BLOOD ON THE TARMAC

In Brooklyn I contemplate
What curious maladies are borne
By the surprise drip

Of sixth floor air
Conditioners effusively
Placating heat

But here, static, out
The window of seat 6A
I see blood

On the tarmac, its elegant
Maroon arch like
One half of a pelvis

As a voice pervades
Enumerating the emergency
Procedures, I make it

A point to visualize
Such catastrophe in hopes
Of deflating

The cruel whimsy
Of a capricious god
A young child

Vaulting its merciless
Incomprehensibility from the shallow
Of its toothless mouth as we

Begin to roll and soon
We’re aloft, the cemetery
Like a computer

Chip and the impossible
Sky like itself only
Vaster, bluer, two-and-a-half

Hours later we once
Again pierce the shaggy moguls
Of the cloudtop

To reveal green protractor
Ballfields and a myriad
Swimming pools unblinking

Along the dumb, patchwork face
Of the suburbs, I turn
Off my electronic device

Thinking there is
No jet engine where there
Is no mind

There is no love in
The unerring, no embrace
Where the wind is

Absent and what
Is it to explode
But the pencil point

Extension of learning?
To evolve except
A heightened susceptibility

To the brutal modicums
Of furthering control? Thousands
Of glimmering autos

Wait in their anonymous lots
As we fall upon
Minnesota, the last

Place I could be called
Innocent and since then
My ignorance has

Not stopped alarming
Me, not grown
Less than a compounded

Sum of my experience so
You see there is no love in the one
True path just

As there is a canceling sweetness
In the poem’s last
Line, awkward thunder

In the airplane’s furious deceleration
Warm distance in each
Of the loved ones you return

To from so very far away.