a poem that found me and reminds me that we are all passengers on the plane

A la belle étoile
by Daniel Anderson

It's late. Even our flight attendants drowse,
And twenty thousand feet below
Vermont is pillowed safely in snow.

Across that dove-gray nether world
A night-shift worker navigates her car,
Her headlights veering like a ruined star

Toward several lamp-lit cottages that house
Mysterious and forbidden lives.
What is it that we see out there,

We sleepless passengers who stare
Where the moon and pewter clouds carouse?
Or on the starboard aisle, who eye

Those shifting galaxies and nebulae --
Star-dusted, far-off Syracuse,
Rochester glittering and Buffalo?

Some read detective novels, some
The lacquered glamour ads in magazines,
While others study lace and fern

Of frost feathering the Plexiglas.
Cleveland, Mansfield, then Columbus pass
Like cities winter-deep in fireflies.

"O my good gosh! Millinocket Lake?"
A woman's gingham voice from behind us cries.
"We used to spend our summers there!"

"I hate to say this but the world issmall,"
The liver-spotted man beside her sighs.
And maybe you can nearly start to see

Old Millinocket Lake, the family camp
Where it is always 1963,
July and smoky and a little damp.

The cabin is tobacco-dark inside,
Fishing tackle tangled at its door,
Sand sprinkled on its thinly varnished floor.

All day the oscillating fan's blade
Nick-nick-nicking at its metal cage,
Grandfather on the dock at his easel,

Painting the children in their birch canoe.
Snapdragon-yellow sun. Trees, beetle green.
Such north Atlantic rarities in blue.

Our destination smolders into view,
A phosphorescent cluster on the south,
And Millinocket goes the way

Of each refinery and farm,
Each tinseled hamlet over which we've flown.
Our Boeing dips its wing. We hear the high

Accelerating whine, the chuck
And grumble of the landing gear.
Then suddenly the cosmic and the vast

Sharpen to particulars at last.
Those candelabra, that bright chandelier,
The distant cigarette and awl

Englarge as through a looking glass
To vacant lot and spot-lit salvage yard,
Smokestack and Methodist spire.

Warehouses ribbed with razor wire
Are haloed in a carbide glow.
Yet even from here, this simple height,

This jurisdiction of the common crow,
The inexplicable, unjust and sad
Seem comfortably nestled among

The paisley, checkerboard and plaid
Facade of Nashville, Tennessee
Where just a little while from now

The clenched young woman sitting next to me
Will walk the beige and hollow length
Of her apartment building hall,

Jangle her copper keys, then formulate
The very last thing she should have said --
Exact and ruthless -- to her new

Ex-lover sleeping soundly in his bed
Way up in ice-bound Montreal
Where she would rather be instead.