Pacific

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“After midnight the moon set and I was alone with the stars. I have often said that the lure of flying is the lure of beauty.”

Amelia Earhart

It was Valentine’s Day I bent to the stranger’s scar

The beds filled. The moon laying its light on men abandoned

to their immediate selves was half and seen through

a welt of tree limbs that opened on the night.

It was inflamed, segmented as a tapeworm, running the length of his neck

before going into his gown. I lifted the cotton to see

if it settled in the hairs of his chest.

℘

One could disappear in this,

above rainfall and cloud, oceanic mist. Every half-hour

I am to crank the cable, let it out in an arc under the plane and radio in

what the instruments read. It is all water—

night stars are setting in the expansive light-tipped migration of it.

One is bound to think anything in this humming shell of propulsion.

I dismiss most as thought and the rest becomes real.

℘

They shoveled a trench that snow fell into— the butt of a rifle

struck the bridge of a nose, a bayonet gouged a cheek, tore the inside

of a throat. Some froze, fingers and feet amputated.

In the hospital I’d seen them as kites, caught above the current,

aching to come down and let anything become their lives.

They were mirrors

in the earth. They saw each other and what they saw was themselves,

a gaping eye, a rictus of brutality, clear and waiting.

℘

I tell them I am getting tired of this fog.

I’m not sure they hear me

with all that crackle in their ears and mine and I’m not sure it matters

I can always drop down and find a gray vessel in the dark swells.

Eight hours out and up and there’s no way I can miss.

Eight thousand feet, 135 miles an hour and nothing but me, my memory

working like a rhumb line back to my birth, which must’ve been like this—

water, flying, an expectant crowd.

℘

On Sundays I took a streetcar to the stables, pockets filled with sugar and carrot

for a brindled mare I’d ride over the cold muck of new thaw.

The men were getting to me— none of them looked guilty—it was as if you could love them

in their laughter. I took myself in, wore myself,

cautiously, around the theological college, around the patients.

What they did was common, vain.

I listened to the distant factories on nights I thought of holding a soldier

as his ache and cry came like milk.

℘

Money was my father’s tonal center, the place his mouth always went back to

The day after I broke his bottle in the basement sink we walked a muddy field

to see an aspen that was struck by lightning

It was severed four feet up the trunk, its crown of curling leaves convinced my father he needed

to tell me he had no purpose or income.

He was an inventor of one thing.

He drank to rummage in the cleft and noise of his misgivings.

℘

We were up late drinking lemon water, biting into soft biscuits,

navigating. The night loosed. A needle

sank to its groove, bridge was dealt with a red deck,

and 1934 was a room with two soft lamps. I’ll always slip into that scene for reassurance.

When it was my turn to talk about fathers I said:

Hawaii

is now one short flight to volcanoes and birds

you’ve never seen— where the land grows before your eyes.

℘

My father must have felt like nowhere.

There is no anger or malice in equations, science’s polemics are peaceful—

there is just proof or uncertainty.

This is where family begins to open in me, like an orange,

like the moment you know you’ve given the wrong gift.

My father was abandoned, died in debt.

When I think of him it is with pity, the...