grey reeds grow taller now
on a dune spilling across
an abandoned landing strip. a wrecked
hangar clanking in a late fall wind
sounds like a bell to
come home, though there’s no home here.
if there are traces of
any planes at all they’re invisible,
except maybe for those two long tire marks
that curve out into sand from a
cracked runway, and those might be from a car,
some locals dragging here after sundown years ago.
do I miss departures and arrivals? hardly; I would settle for
settling here: make myself a shelter out of these ruins
and hunker down. it’s a dark world
outside these gates. you can’t really fly anywhere
these days that doesn’t smell like abandonment. instead,
I’ll sit down, build a fire, get comfortable with discomfort.
maybe, though,
I might dare to hope
to be spotted by
some last adventurer who’ll touch down lightly and let me board
as if nothing had changed here, as if we could still
go up expecting to come down to something we could recognize.
Dark Matter 