Here's one other poem about flying
and the title is a technical term, it's called Climbing Out.
Technically you are at one end of the runway and you
have rushed the throttle forward,
so you are running down the runway,
and then you tilt the nose of the plane up.
And from that moment on until you
get to the altitude you want, you
are doing something called climbing out.
Blue fluid in my limbs, momentum buoys me up at takeoff speed
as I lose ground for that puzzle older than hearsay, whose
thralldom is a witless bird navigating a meadow.
Then heavily afloat, I run the river
rapids we know only by effect.
Smoke chugging downwind, apple bars swinging their fruit
like sensors, the heat mirage gusty over Lake Cayuga
when, as now, it's flat steel burning in the sun.
Below me planes sit, nose up, on the airfield
like energy resting.
Only cloud puffs high above.
At 3,000 feet, hard atilt, I stall,
and a warning buzzer screams like a marmoset
loose in the cabin.
The hull trembles, shudders twice
like a woman gently coming, then nestles
straight down toward quilted green and bedrock,
till I get wind of the right attitude
for lying long on the air,
and land like someone tripping over toys in the darkness:
stagger, lurch, recovered fall.
But late at night, still awake in the birdless,
starless black of my bedroom, I am
the moon rinsed with glitter, floating full
over a pokey and obedient land.
I am motion unmasked by a wafer of steel.
I am lift made visible.
I am a dancer with starched coat tails for wings.
I am the mouth of a river whose source is the sky.
I am trembling and hot from this power-on stall.
I am flight luscious.
I am kneeling on air.