Well, I was going to read an airplane.
And so, for once, I don't resent one of these going over.
Airplane poem.
[SOUND OF AIRPLANE PASSING OVERHEAD]
This one began on an airplane over Missoula, Montana.
I was flying in for a reading.
And it looked clear.
I thought we could land, and we kept going round and around
in circles.
And I'd always thought circles were holy,
but I revised my opinions of circles
and called this poem, "Holding Pattern."
We were up there because, as I quote the pilot in the poem,
there was a slight technical difficulty.
And if there weren't a mechanic in Missoula,
we would have kept going to points east.
It's dedicated to two nuns, Sister Madeleine DeFrieze
and Sister Michelle Burch, who were waiting for me down below.
"Holding Pattern."
"Poetry is a way of counting, sisters, it is acquisitive.
I try to find something to hold on to, laid up in heaven.
Held down, ill at ease, but blameless,
I meet no one in the air, in terrible anticipation
to walk with you, paper-soled women
into the brick learning places and open-windowed rooms.
So it is eternal--
this aught that we believe to be a high degree of order,
with the controlled suspense of the sun.
As I circle you, you hold your crosses sacred,
those four straight routes that draw off pain
and that lightning body they ground.
I began with a line, hardly a pardonable sin in my book.
How much should you see of yourself, or say?
Sometimes I want to be told what is great.
'We have developed a slight technical difficulty and may
not be able to land without a mechanic.'
We are in the habit of writing, and any power
we may derive from each other's company
will circle quietly over the page, complicated as what we
don't see, but the pilot knows.
In whatever space, we fly by our own mettle
with words that count much as friends
and with a heightened sense of where it all ends."