Flight

after "Endings" by Eavan Boland from An Origin Like Water: Collected Poems 1967-1987:



Carry On Baggage

A plane flares through the night.
The pilot doesn’t know me
yet holds my life with his own.

Long dark space
the bright stars tremble in:
Castor and Pollux—
Orion, the Great Bear—
gentle Pleiades.

Back in coach
I dream
of those I have ventured with:

a hand
in a hand
crossing over
the wine-dark sea.