The girl across the aisle, with the window seat,
says she's going to dream of Chicago. She pops
Dramamine, pulls her hood up over her face.
She becomes a gull, is hovering near a pier
in an imaginary windy city. Because
Rothko said we should stand
as close as our nose allows,
I toss toward the girl-gull's beak my
hope that near-death experiences shrink
to pinpricks, are like headlights
from a slow car passed miles ago.
The girl-gull cups her wings
into an eyelash shape, lands on a piling. She plucks
bread from my palm, is like a god
revising the universe, plucking
stars too dim to fire-up life on
planets whose oceans, air, and cupboards
contain the ingredients for it. She eats the bread version
of me as a rock hiding a sun within it. The bread
runs out. I become the gull on the piling next to the girl,
and tell her, in English, not even sure if
we have a nest, or if the behavior is customary,
that it's my turn to warm the eggs.

__

The fear is not "of flying," I don't think, even though that's the way most of us say it. The fear behind the fear of flying is, rather, the fear "not flying." The Dramamine girl who was the seed for this poem is in the "over-the-counter" category of self-medicators, self-medication being the primary way many of us who fear not-flying get from Denver to Chicago, etc., when we must get there in a timely fashion. A second major category of self-medicators are the "prescription" medicators, whose doctors give them pills that allow them to sleep through it all, dreaming, perhaps, of paradise. I belong to the third category of self-medicators, we who arrive early enough at the terminal to drink ourselves into an accepting haze on overpriced drinks at airport bars. I recently boarded a flight the day a plane crashed in Russia, killing the Polish president and many other high-ranking officials. None of talked about that. We talked about poetry and read poems. If it was going to be the day we died, we refused to die miserably.