Flight Arrival

Welcome to February! It’s that time of year in the northern hemisphere when those furthest north start to think about traveling to some place warmer and less snowy. We’re tired of snow and blustery weather, ready to go somewhere nicer. Flight Arrival is touches on that moment in-between places, traveling, but not quite touched down into the new location.

Flight Arrival

Great fish school the sky, formation just so.
Not clouds, exactly, but cloudlets, hoping to grow
and become something else. Don’t we all? Is this
their end, loose affiliation of friend gathered
to withstand together what would separately disperse?
Too many clouds. Too many puffs of precious white,
too easily herded into their present rank and file. They flit
together, jostled fin by fin toward synchronicity, skittish,
yet too trusting in false security of numbers. Each one
trails another billowy member, so like itself.
Then summits the horizon, plunges over. Of course
questions remain, but what point in asking?
No sonnet can answer, though I caught you wondering.
Now among them, innumerable clouds brush against,
perhaps, many sonnets, but on the ground fall only shadows.

Flight Arrival is also an echo poem

When I say it is an echo poem I mean it echoes another poem, sometimes explicitly or sometimes in a particular craft usage. In this case, the echoes running through this poem are the voice of Elizabeth Bishop, specifically Bishop’s voice in the poem Questions of Travel (from the collection of the same name) and Poem (from her collection Geography III). It is a sense of continually attempting to specify what is not specifiable that I feel moving through here, and a hesitance to name something with finality, a hesitance to be the final judge while at the same time recognizing judgements as made.

Flight Arrival also echoes form, playing off the expectations we have for a sonnet, while not meeting those expectations directly.

This poem was first published in Olentangy Review, Issue 21, Winter 2016. Over on their site, you can also listen to a recording of me reading the poem.

Have a great week, and look for another poem next Monday. As always, comments welcome.