Bird Woman, 1910
- Bird Woman, 1910
The Wright brothers warped wingsto corner the wind. They built a seatfor racing, wrappedtheir flight school with rules:
No drinking.No swearing.No flying on Sundays.No females.
What man claims God does not allow women to fly?
Glenn Curtiss says he won't teach womeneither. But I know motors: my father gave methe keys to the Cadillac when I was thirteen.
To keep me out of trouble, he said.
Last year I coaxed an Overland coast to coast.On the door: the car, the girl, and the wide, wide world.
Yes, I'm a finishing-school girl,Miss Blanche Stuart Scott of Rochester,five foot one, dark red hair.If I marry myselfto a rackety engine,of course it will attract publicity.
I partner my plane in a ballroom of air.Up where the landscape opens, I steerwithout rutted roads to slow me.
Clouds nudge my feet as they shadow-slipacross lakes and farms two hundred yards below. [End Page 125]
DOLORES HAYDEN's recent work appears in Poetry, Yale Review, Southwest Review, and the Common. Exuberance, a sequence of persona poems set in the early years of aviation, in which "Bird Woman, 1910" appears, is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in 2019.
