Have you ever noticed what a young thing an airplane is?
Yes, I know we began flying a hundred years ago,
but age and years are not always the same.
Surely you see how young they are: the way they crowd the tarmac
adolescent in their idleness. Eager. Antsy.
They trundle stiff-armed down the runway, ungainly and awkward,
Gathering speed in foolhardy optimism.
Then (and if nothing else is proof of their immature age,
let it be this)
A falsetto shriek and they fling themselves into the receding heavens.
What– in heaven’s name– makes them believe they can do this?
From where I sit, I watch the jointless wing tremble.
Once solid jounce and it would crack and sever, then spin headlong
to the earth.
Heedless, the airplane squints into the weather, more aware
of its white-plumed wake than of this insubstantial air.
The explanation is absurd: some noise about high and low pressure,
the curvature of the wing.
Nonsense. The plane flies because it wants to, because it thinks it can,
because adolescents and children both live by something other than their eyes.
Safely on the ground, I watch another one in its improbable launch.
It rises, turns, curves, cuts across the bottomless blue.
Held aloft by what? Something more solid than physics.
Does the airplane even know? Or does it launch regardless,
expectant, in resolute reliance on the invisible infinite?
