Regional Airport
flying from Tuscaloosa to Boston


The terminal has twenty molded, plastic seats
and a mural that peddles the whole magical system:
flight lines as urgent as the marks of Lascaux — 
crisscrossing the country over which levitation will happen,
an enormous cat's cradle spanning from sea to sea.
The air outside is clear but for a harrier hawk
making lazy circles in the sky: We know we belong
to the land, and the land...

As our flight lifts, the plowing commences below
for corn and okra, that curious crop with curved
green seedpods pointing skyward, ladies fingers,
so called. From this bird's-eye on high I see,
we all see, how the land recedes into shapes:
first the big agricultural patchwork,
then commemorative stamps,
then a weightless idea above the clouds.

Wings fly in the cabin.
Men and women wear jackets with wings.
Soon I drink from a wingéd cup,
eat with a wingéd fork and spoon,
call a woman with wings on her suit,
press a wingéd napkin to my mouth.
Aloft along one of the lines rising, rising
like a home run going going over the fence
and out of the Black Warrior watershed.

In that harrowed place, a red acre
will bear a body on its earthly rounds.
There is a stand of olive trees, trundled as slips
from dry Demopolis (near Eutaw), and beds
of our mothers' established vinca spreading
their constant tangle, defeating erosion, dark
and flowering by season. There scuppernongs
last bloomed and splayed an obscure aristocracy
in the sun. A woman long dead was a child in their
shade, and she the soft-armed ruler of memory.

In the shining city where this flight will land,
untold souls have arrived from afar, have trembled
in new rooms when quakes roll from the blue hills
into this good city’s glacial bowl. With every flight,
did they pray that other lands, voices, scents,
selves, need never end — even as fresh balms come,
as they do, to appease the long leave-takings.

 
First appeared in The Atlantic, 1988; revised 2024
Homage Travel Stories & Essays | Poems | Contents at-a-Glance