Ah, but one gets swept up
in the airport throng, all those workaday faces,
faintly pampered and spoiled in the boomer style,
and those elders dressed like children for flying
in hi-tech sneakers and polychrome catsuits,
and those gum-chewing attendants taking tickets
while keeping up a running flirtation with a uniformed bystander,
a stoic blond pilot-
all so normal, who could resist
this vault into the impossible?
Your sweat has slowly dried. Your praying neighbor
has fallen asleep, emitting an odor of cardamom.
His briefcase seems to have deflated.
Perhaps not this time, then.
But the possibility of impossibility will keep drawing us back
to this scrape against the numbed sky,
to this sleek sheathed tangle of color-coded wires, these
million rivets, the wing
like a frozen lake at your elbow.
New Orleans
Fruit of a French scam, the New World being
one big get-rich-quick scheme, it sank its bricks
in Mississippi mud; the first dry row
received the wood of columned Greek revival.
The whores in Storyville were kept in cribs
like pigs, naked and doomed. The yellow fever
wiped out one third the populace each summer,
but there were always more, both slaves and masters.
Now good times are the commodity marketed,
not cotton, indigo, molasses, rice.
