The plane shudders and shakes and lurches.
Outside, lightning, exposed and buried by clouds.
The lady next to you has a dying sister,
and takeoff was long delayed, and you don’t ask
if it might be too late. You are thinking
of the German plane crashed in the Alps by the co-pilot
who wanted to die and take everyone with him
and you’re thinking how living is always lit against
the dark and you think there I go again making
metaphor while the lady sits there while lightning
connects the plus at the top of the cloud
with the minus at the bottom as if the cloud were
at war with itself, driving itself crazy trying to reconcile.
You have a sense of flying through space
which is funny because you always are, as surely
as if you were Saint Francis flapping your habit
down the road, keeping nothing, giving away even
what you need, smiling at the lack, the beautiful
emptiness that allows birds to fly through, even
through clouds, and allows for the forest
to be clothed for its creatures and you one
of its creatures with bare feet and the kind of
attention that can turn to the lady, shedding
everything else. You see Saint Francis and his monks
heading down the road, joyful and homeless.
You feel the attraction of homelessness
to those with homes, the wish to be free,
to be weightless, but always as an in-between
state, with a fire someplace, a hearth, a sister.
Still, the mind doesn’t shake it off, the plane not
arriving, heaven not coming on earth, and
what it must look like from out there at night,
this lone vessel carrying on with its small lights.
Fleda Brown’s The Woods Are On Fire: New & Selected Poems, was chosen by Ted Kooser for his University of Nebraska poetry series in 2017. She has nine previous collections of poems. Her work has appeared three times in The Best American Poetry and has won a Pushcart Prize, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Philip Levine Prize, and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writer’s Award, and has twice been a finalist for the National Poetry Series. Her memoir, Driving With Dvorak, was published in 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. She is professor emerita at the University of Delaware, where she directed the Poets in the Schools program. She was poet laureate of Delaware from 2001-07. She now lives with her husband, Jerry Beasley, in Traverse City, Michigan, and is on the faculty of the Rainier Writing Workshop, a low-residency MFA program in Tacoma, Washington.