Red Letter Poem #182

 Red Letter Poem #182

 

 

 

 

 

In flight with Thoreau

 

 

I am awake between two sleeping people

their dreams swirl about me in the airplane air

restless in this rocking crib batted gently

by the hands of unenclosed winds

how many others sleep or read or scribble

in our little city hurtling through the sky

a baby cries without heart or conviction

this too seeps into the sleep of my seat mates

the baby tries another voice     its thin thread

straggles like the light in Thoreau’s winter pines

 

 

––Mary Buchinger

 

 

 

Don’t get me wrong: I have known the peace of wandering the pine-rimmed path around Walden Pond––when summer has passed, the swimmers and picnickers vanished, and a stillness returned.  I’ve relished placing my stone atop the always-mounting cairn beside the foundation of Thoreau’s cabin––and then retreating to the gentle slope to watch low sun creasing the waters.  But I have to confess I feel a similar sort of peace descending upon me––a deep welling of contentment, of anticipation, of (dare I say it) an almost holy attention––whenever that reminder comes crackling over the intercom “to make sure your seatbelts are fastened and the seats are in their upright and locked positions”, and we begin taxiing out to the runway.  Right then, the things you’ve left behind, the tasks undone, will remain so (at least for a while.)  What little you think you absolutely need has been crammed into a suitcase and secured somewhere out of reach.  And whatever sense of control you experience (real or imagined)––over momentary choices, future plans, or your very existence––has been ceded to other hands, other forces.  You look around at the anxious faces who share this space and cannot help but experience a certain sense of community knowing that, for a few hours at least, you will share a common fate.  Airborne, I’ll feel how small and fragile are all our elaborate dreams, as I gaze down at the minute cars inching along thoroughfares, and the neat rows of houses crammed together like kernels of corn.  In his writing, Thoreau experienced awestruck moments, humbled by nature’s encompassing power.  For many of us, the time spent being carried into the heavens on aluminum wings is as close as we come to spiritual surrender.

 

Mary Buchinger is a prize-winning poet who has authored seven collections of poetry, the newest being Navigating the Reach (from Ireland’s Salmon Poetry.)  She’s currently a professor of English and communication studies at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences in Boston; and she serves on the board of the venerable New England Poetry Club.  What I find most captivating about Mary’s writing is the nimble way she navigates an array of emotional, aesthetic, and even historical forces.  In a poem like today’s offering, she’s done away with punctuation so that ideas conjoin, diverge, buck as if negotiating turbulence, and then continue on-course toward some quiet clarity.  Did you admire, as I did, those lines: “a baby cries without heart or conviction/ this too seeps into the sleep of my seat mates”?  That string of long vowels and clipped consonants soothes the ear, contrasting to the unsettling implication of the words.  Is this, I wonder, how Henry David’s quiet desperation is first born inside our lives––when we intuit that we’re carried along by unknowable forces, and sleep is only a fleeting comfort?  So we look for something with which we can steady our thoughts––and perhaps we recall a passage from Walden like this: “After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep. . . But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips.”  Perhaps we tell ourselves we’ll embrace the open questions, attempt to appreciate what a few hours disconnected from our terrestrial lives may grant?  Clouds barge past our windows and, through the breaks, we glimpse the winter-darkened hills slipping beneath us.  It may be that our direction has long been determined––our only choice being whether or not we can appreciate the passage.  Thoreau goes on: “The snow lying deep on the earth dotted with young pines, and the very slope of the hill on which my house is placed, seemed to say, Forward!”  And carried by a similar momentum, we too continue the journey.

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

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