Flights of Fancy

The poem below reminds me of my own flying thoughts.  For a multitude of reasons, I dislike the entire experience.  Arriving early.  Security is like cattle roaming through a maze to be slaughtered into Happy Meals.  And on the way, anxious thoughts like, “Did I forget to remove my Swiss Army Knife out of my bag?  Will they lose my baggage?  Where is my ticket?”

It’s a tawdry affair.  Chirping “flight attendants.”  Sitting far too close to strangers, especially those who want to engage me in intimate conversation which ultimately descends into banality.  Stingy portions of peanuts and soft drinks.  Threadbare seats whose foam padding has been scrunched to the density of plywood.

But upon occasion, I arrive at the airport, armed with a few selected magazines and a book, one book that so rarely sucks me in, say In Cold Blood.  I arrive after a night’s restful sleep.  Speed through the line without incident.  The seat next to me is empty.  The flight attendant doesn’t recognize that my seat is slightly reclined.  And were off on a four-hour flight to the West Coast.  

I read.  I nap.  My mind wanders into places where, if I am both aware and able to admit it, I find deep contentment.  And these thoughts, I seldom articulate, for fear of boring others or inciting derision.  .  

The beauty of long trips alone is that there are few distractions.  This poem celebrates the inner life, the places our minds wander to thoughts of which we are barely cognizant. 

After reading it, I was catapulted to 1988.  Under the guidance of a gawky professor who wore shirts too small, whose ties were garish, and whose beard often was inhabited by bits of lint, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses.  

 It was a reading experience I had never had before because it thrust me from the realm of realism.  And it was a long novel, a complex novel, one that demanded rereading.  It is a book that might be more apt to say requires study over a lifetime.  

Like other Modernists, he used interior monologue.  I think of it as both a technique as well as the subject, itself, of the novel.  It occurs in Dublin on June 16, 1904, is interior monologue.  Past, present, and future all meld in the mind.  Flights of fancy, what could be, and what never was become real. 

And in this poem, the narrator considers the hereafter.  She considers, she creates the lives of varied souls, and her own yearning for something better.  

Meditation from 14A  by Jennifer Maier

And what if the passage out of this life
is like a flight from Seattle to St. Louis--

the long taxi out of the body, the brief
and terrible acceleration, the improbable

buoyancy, and then the moment when,
godlike, you see the way things fit

together: the grave and earnest roads
with their little cars, stitching their desires

with invisible thread; the tiny pushpin houses
and backyard swimming pools, dreaming

the same blue dream. And who but the dead
may look down with impunity on these white

birds, strewn like dice above the river whose name
you have forgotten, though you know,

having crossed the Divide, that it flows
east now, toward the vast, still heartland,

its pinstriped remnants of wheat and corn
laid out like burial clothes. And how

you would like to close your eyes, if only
you could stop thinking about that small scratch
   
on the window, more of a pinprick, really,
and about yourself sucked out! anatomized!--

part of you now (the best part) a molecule
of pure oxygen, breathed in by the farmer

on his tractor; by the frightened rabbit
in the ditch; by a child riding a bike

in Topeka; by the sad wife of a Mexican
diplomat; by a dog, digging up a bone

a hundred years in the future, that foreign city
where you don't know a soul, but where you think

you could start over, could make a whole
new life for yourself, and will.


"Meditation from 14A" by Jennifer Maier, from Dark Alphabet. (c) Southern Illinois University Press, 2006.