Jenne Knight
Panicles
At the lake, I waited for my mother
with the pink and violet lilacs at the waterfront,
listening for the sounds of her car.
I was eight, tucking the velvet clusters into my hair.
My hands smelled like spring and metal:
lake water and rust.
For a moment, I could hear her
in my grandparents’ driveway,
or in their house, out watering their garden.
The vanilla smell of ponderosa;
the delicate puffs of cottonwoods.
Nearby, the ghost of the Ice House
was still a bruise on the upturned soil.
The relic from my grandfather, who had heaved
lake ice with pick and prong, was gone.
That summer, we grew corn and beefsteak tomatoes
my mother wrapped in paper towels.
She salted them, ate them like apples.
Now, those lilacs grow back when I think of spring,
of days before the ice prongs and picks
became decorations on the wall.
The gnarled pink grows from hands that stretch
from wherever I am and up through any ceiling.
They punch fresh holes through plaster.
Old beams raise themselves and soon
it smells like lake and lilac and pine.
The Ice House restores itself board by board.
I find myself returned, eight again.
My mother is pulling in the driveway.
I pet the lake into her hair, and then we’re walking
past the Ice House, toward thick indigo and pink
and cottonwoods at the water’s edge.
In memory, the trees are always in bloom.
Footprints, grainy in the dim light,
walk past again, with armloads of towels,
a silver air mattress tucked beneath an arm.
Grandma picks out lake stones with her netted shoes
and tosses them to shore.
The scent of lilac mixes with murky lakebed
and coffee or the briny scent off the Sound.
I lie on the couch, on the dock, dangling my legs
as mom floats by on air.
Meditations on Air Travel
The way you let your heart squish
against tissue, let your nails dig
into your palms, the armrests,
and you’re so acutely alive, so aware
of your body, imagining
a safe, pink aura
around the skin of the craft–
around the shell of your skin.
You hold your breath, cup your hands
in a sort of prayer
with every bump that sends
sparks of discomfort,
the trillions of neural pathways
that light up, not unlike
the hundred miles of wires around you,
alive with electricity.
There are twenty-five feet
of small and large intestine
in the average human body.
It will absorb ninety percent
of the Ginger Ale
that soothes the nervous burble.
The Germans call it “flying thing.”
Its aluminum membrane,
titanium, steel, and composites
remind you of your skin, fillings, marrow, sinew,
that heart of yours still thumping,
drumming on your rib cage
as if it could echo through this cabin.
You must breathe the slow, deep,
counted breaths
that will slow your mind, dull its focus.
The beverage carts, snacks,
coffee, and cologne
make it all seem so mundane
like the miracle-that’s-not-a-miracle of birth.
You once read that pilots and copilots
must eat different meals and one in six
Americans will get food poisoning this year.
You know that an average commercial plane
weighs approximately ninety-thousand pounds,
a 747 has over six million parts,
a human body has two-hundred-six bones,
and sitting in the tail increases survival
by forty percent.
Above all, you know
that right now, in this very second,
as your heart squeezes its tight fist
and you exhale slowly, inhale with control,
there are over sixty thousand
human bodies in flight.
