JANE (1971)

She’d lost it all—
her peppermint green
Cadillac Deville,
and a white fox stole
like the fur Marilyn wore.
It was time to land in Montreal.
She looked down at her dress,
which was obviously unclean.
She tried to calm herself. This
was her first flight since the divorce.
When the pilot’s voice came calling
he calmed her nervousness back.
She stepped into the aisle when
from the restroom, a minister approached.
He was the embodiment of Jacopo
del Casentino’s Saint John the Baptist—
a waif man dressed in a humeral veil
like a shadow at noon. He asked
if she was fine. She leaned in but
couldn’t see his face. He whispered
a short prayer: God is with you, child,
no matter when. No matter where.

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JANE (2056)

On a day unlike today, with a sky-blackened gray
stands an oak with branches hovering like hands
holding the storm away. This tree grows now
on John’s Island in South Carolina. There has been folk
who have said this oak is filled with specters. It’s true.

Yet no one is sure. No one has seen these seraphim—
it has always been simply conjectured. To be set free
from this tree, one would need the Godspeed of an angel.
From the ground, not a sound can be heard, not
from up high, not from a bird. In this grim tree
is a wicked banshee or a welcomed pet to a single eaglet.

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JANE (1973)

Nothing about Jane was plain.
From winsome flight attendant
to wife, and soon divorced
from a cheating spouse
who ran away with another
woman. She rested her eyes
as she stood in the galley,
her head against a wall.
The plane dipped. Lights
flickered in the aisle,
a figure as pale
as the dead sang and danced,
          Angels, Archangels he outstripped¹
          salt grips the road and awaits his lift again,
          street orange glow shades the odds against.²
At twenty-six, she returned
to work in mustard-colored
wool and a matching cape—
the standard uniform. She grew
her hair long like before.
Once a passenger commented
that she was the living incarnation
of Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele.

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^{1From Christina Rosetti, “The Convent Threshold”
2From Stereophonics, “Not Up to You”}

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JANE (1986)

I dreamt
I was
a weightless ribbon
an astronaut
alight
in a lilac hurricane     of sunlight
                    on the first morning
of flight
I am alone
in the warring morning
with a lit cigarette
I flick it off a bridge
when my flesh gives in
high               above a lagoon of lights
past traffic
past freeway
do not enter
into the past
I stare and watch cars everywhere
stuck
together all over town
I am                in love
with rows of planets
and comets
coming into view
toward a queue of clouds
I am drunk
on this highway we loved
a boom of smog
meets me                then a tensile curve of the road
a forest of homes rise
with lilies
to meet us
               I’m tired of being told
the world won’t be worth much
in a million years
though it can’t be true
or must never be
how difficult
it must be           in this body
believe me           in this flesh
watch                    this car fly
in the distance
cargo ships sail
we fly               well past tomorrow
like a god
through the night
thick with stars

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JANE (1982)

One night we left at sunset from Reykjavik
to Boston, a fourteen-hour flight.

In first class, as passengers slept,
frost collected on the windows.

In descent,
the plane began to weep.

On the runway, the ground crew collected
cargo of confetti from an Airborne Express 767.

From the passenger lounge came a congregation of voices—
laughing and talking, rising and falling with the plane.

On the radio, a commercial interrupted for Girl Scouts—a new perfume
by Elizabeth Arden, with the scent of chocolate chips.

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JANE (1987)

I’m in first class, so I pay her no attention until she changes
her tone. She ran off with a man who wasn’t her own? Betting
double or nothing—she was a whale of a player who dazzled
the birds every summer and fall. Vegas is where her husband
once lived with Rock whom he met shortly after and soon
began to spend the night with him secretly huffing. She’d come
home early one afternoon and found them post-coitus, spoon to spoon.

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JANE (1967)

It was her last red-eye with a DC-7 owl comet flight.

She departed the Eight Avenue Line at the Central Park West stop. Most of the streetlamps were out or broken. It was a stormy night in July. The bars were closing.

From around the corner came a song, and she sang along. Please allow me to introduce myself. ¹ A film crew was setting up across the street at the Dakota apartments.

Please allow me to introduce myself. As she stepped onto the curb, a gun, a poco moto, came toward her. The sound of the music grew. When I saw it was a time for a change Killed Tsar and his ministers. Anastasia screamed in vain.

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¹Lyrics taken from “Sympathy For The Devil” by The Rolling Stones

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Even Cleaner

We crunched the numbers and came to the conclusion
that we hadn’t been using the water right, especially
that which coursed through our bathrooms, farms
and factories. We kept this to ourselves
because we were hoping to get a raise.
Our infants emerged from the womb looking smudged,
like they’d just been dragged from a mining disaster.
It took industrial solvent to clean them up,
and even then they didn’t smell right.
But clean them up we did, then sent them off
to Bible College where they got even cleaner
and lost their smell. We were proud of them.
When they were old enough to think
for themselves, they had us lined up and shot.

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Can

There, sparkling at the bottom of
this mountain stream, lies the beer can.
It makes me feel new just to look at it.
Had the water not been so clear, I might
have missed it. It is hard not to think
of the foundries that smelted the aluminum,
the sheer genius it took to make it so thin,
so cylindrical. It makes me want a beer.
I wonder how much mud it holds, what kind
of life lives there? Maybe a crawdad, for
the hole in its top has been punched in
far enough for a small one to enter.
They are almost beautiful, the letters, black
on yellow, the glint of the bare bottom.

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Hello There

I speak as an old man in the Twenty-First
Century when I want people to ignore me.
I find their cultivated dismissiveness
reassuring. It means I’ve done my job.
I had one last thing to say, and for the life
of me, I couldn’t remember what it was,
and that’s a good thing because they
don’t give a shit one way or the other.
But sometimes one will stare directly at
my face and lie, just to see what I
will do. It took me years to learn to lie
back at them, and I don’t have that many
years left. They will smile at me and say,
Hello there. They used to just say, Hello.

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