O C T O B E R   1 9 9 5

REGIONAL AIRPORT

The terminal has twenty molded-plastic seats, and a mural that peddles the whole
magical system: flight lines--urgent as the ochre and charcoal marks of Lascaux--
crisscrossing the country over which levitation will happen: a cat's cradle from sea to sea.

Outside, the air is clear but for a hawk, a chicken hawk, making lazy circles in the sky:
"We know we belong to the land, and the land we . . ." As our flight lifts,
the ploughing commences for corn and okra, that crop of crone fingers pointing.

From this bird's-eye on high, I see, we all see, how the land recedes into shapes:
first the big agricultural patchwork, then commemorative stamps, then a weightless idea 
above the clouds. Wings fly in the cabin. Men and women wear jackets with wings.

Soon I drink from a winged cup, eat with a winged fork and spoon,
call a woman with wings on her breast, press a winged napkin to my mouth.
Aloft along a line rising, a home run going going, out of the Black Warrior watershed.

In that harrowed place, a red acre meets a stair that bears a body on its slight descent.
There is a stand of olives trundled as slips from dry Demopolis (below Eutaw),
and beds of our mothers' established vinca spreading their constant tangle,

defeating erosion, dark and flowering by season. There scuppernongs last bloomed
and splayed an obscure aristocracy in the sun: a woman long dead was a child in their shade
and she the soft-armed ruler of memory. Driven . . . Abandoned . . . Misplaced . . . Whatever

balm of belief comes for the long leave-taking--in the moraine where this flight has settled,
when tremors roll from the blue surrounding hills into the city's good glacial bowl,
my assumed rooms tremble, otherwise accented, on their axis.

Emily Hiestand is a visual artist, writer of essays, and poet living in Cambridge, Massachusettes. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The New York Times, and Best American Poetry.