​VAST

​

Just out of Minneapolis-St. Paul we seemed
briefly to stall as if to shadow
all those wispies drifting below.

The mazes of cul-de-sacs had given way
to assorted squares of barren fields,
their whiskered homesteads glued

to odd corners like stamps, wide ribbon
slipping backward and away, silent terrain
under a lazy canoe. Now the sun

has cast a gray ghost of our plane
down and to my right, framed it within
the awkward porthole, its sliding shade,

an unaccountable halo of rainbow—
and this ridiculous filigree of angels,
filmy leagues camouflaged in ether,

special recruits that mingle and network
like secret agents: the FBI of the sky.
But when we soon tilt and ascend

to the high status toward Denver, I know
all this silliness will vanish, angels fading,
becoming the thin air, and these fields will retreat

to compose vast sheets of stamps, re-impose
perspective, that inevitable severance
from everything that’s then re-imaginable.