Flight

Originally posted 7/12/2003.  The OLDEST poem on this blog, though not even remotely my oldest poem.

There’s a hole in me the size of a departing flight.
Something taxis up to my edge and takes off,
flying out of me toward a horizon.

Not that I can see that horizon;
that’s just what planes are supposed to fly into these days. 
It used to be the wild blue yonder that planes

flew into, but no one thinks planes are that wild anymore —
they seem to us more like stale buses
full of cranky people eating meals

that never fill them,
in precisely the same way
that nothing fills me now. 

Somehow I keep thinking 
even after my mind falls into this hole
and disappears.

I keep thinking that I’m going to rise
and follow that vapor trail into the blush,
catch up to the flight before the sun goes down.

You’d think I’d know better by now.
I ought to know better by now. I ought to be able
to figure this one out.  Some flights

are just lost. You can’t catch
a plane that has been lost, 
not by thinking.