The Poem of Flight

I shall begin with a rose for courage
and a rich green lawn where the crash occurs
with a sound like an old bridge gasping
under a load, and a white country house
from which a lady and her servants stream
toward the twisted moth. I would be
the original pilot, thirty-one, bare-headed,
my curly brown hair cut short and tinged
with blood from a wounded left hand
that must be attended to. Only an hour
before it was a usual summer morning,
warm and calm, in North Carolina,
and the two hectic brothers had laid aside
their bicycles and were busily assembling
the struts, wires, strings, and cranking
over the tiny engine. I faced the wind,
a cigarette in hand, a map of creation
in the other. Silently I watch my hand
disappear into the white gauze the lady
turns and turns. I am the first to fly,
and the time has come to say something
to a world that largely crawls, forwards
or backwards, begging for some crust
of bread or earth, enough for a bad life
or a good death. I've returned because
thin as I am there came a moment
when not to seemed foolish and difficult
and because I've not yet tired
of the warm velvet dusks of this country
of firs and mountain oak. And because
high above the valleys and streams
of my land I saw so little of what is here,
only the barest whiff of all I eat each day.
I suppose I must square my shoulders,
lean back, and say something else,
something false, something that even I
won't understand about why some of us
must soar or how we've advanced beyond
the birds of that not having wings
is an illusion that a man with my money
refuses to see. It is hard to face
the truth, this truth or any other,
that climbing exhausts me, and the more
I climb, the higher I get, the less I
want to go on, and the noise is terrible,
I thought the thing would come apart,
and finally there was nothing there.