Flight to New Orleans

Imagine seeing the heart clearly,
(when it used to be a ghost town)
like light,
moving through two panes
of unmarred airplane glass.


Before I knew of air travel
I could sense a flight plan forming,
could smell it, like a weather pattern
building up against the banks of my southern river;
cold fronts in my father's house, runways inlaid
with pieces of my mother's broken heart,
tornado warnings in my brother's eyes,
and when the storm hit
I flew up,
without license,
without instruction,
into the crowded night streets,
looking for lovers and strangers
to reflect me in the wet pavement,
to postition me in the blackness,
tethered, as I was, by invisible threads
of nothing,
to nothing.

I saw life beyond me, the shape of it,
the perfect cinematography of steam
whistling from a boiling kettle,
the heavy pulse of taxicab traffic,
the mottled flesh of a blood orange,
and I craved what I could not touch in myself
like a ghost who does not know she has died,
and the geography beneath me never changed,
never moved me,
and I was twisted into thin lines like neon,
colored only by the fragile glass around me.

I filled the log book with names
and kept track as best I could but
whole pages turned brittle and yellow,
and I tired of the plot, thickening,
like a forgotten stew on a cold stove,
and more's the pity, I found I was hungry
and could not,
as my ectoplasmic self,
consume enough vice to forget
how to breathe.

I dropped altitude and banked
over New Orleans, a parish that was used
to inclement weather, living below sea level,
and beautiful decay.
I re-entered my body at thirty-three thousand feet,
over the Atchafaylaya Basin, when I saw
the golden risingsun ribbon of the Mississippi,
winding its way toward the delta,
and as my heart settled back in between my ribs
I was aware
that I was no longer
afraid of landing.