POEMS
DANIEL BOSCH
Home Thoughts From Aboard
Continental Flight 94
III
mel/1ory ofJoseph Brodsky
Horizontal Babel,
Your high-pitched hex
Hums in the grunting thrust
Of this plane leaving LAX.
Over the palm-lined, blue Pacific
Cruise ships proud as banks
Wink as I look down
On the land of the swank.
Oh, to be over America!
Where flight attendants' prose
Lulls the savage child
In each of thirty rows ,
And I scan, in trimeter,
Dying for a hi t,
The outlines of ghost cigarettes
They leave so brightly lit.
2
Mesas tabled when
Seas las t Ii tigated
Silently testify
On behalf of Time Incorporated.
The canyon's grand scansion
Is so irregular
The river must not know
The future of free verse-
Yet still its silt slowly
Reveals the past,
And layer by layer
Measures what lasts.
