"Landfall"

The perpetual contrails slice open the sky
To indicate a hundred points of vanishing.
Tinged with evening’s fire, they unfurl
Like banners on the itinerant breeze.
The rumble of a repeatedly broken song swarms upward on air.
While lingering on the shore
with my eyes on their vanishing significance,
My heart beats with the rhythm of sonic eruptions.

Bringing me down to earth, you clasp my hand.
I hate this gravity,
Its incessant drag downward,
The sick heavy reality of standing on land.

Grounded, my steps stumble over the insistence of sand.
We stroll along the shore, two lovers hand-in-hand,
You watch the waves and take comfort in this domestic sea;
I watch the stars, longing for the roar of escape velocity.

Like liquid crystal letters on the smooth
glass surface of your eyes, they unscroll:
Stay
And I read: down.

Cursed ambition, the stone-hard accusations,
I am the most selfish of creatures to eschew this invitation,
Thus, to commune with the choral stars,
To navigate the inexorable enormity,
To soar on nebular wings.
It is in the choice between love and live,
Somewhere in the space betwixt supposed-to and survive.

There, I live,
Beyond the brilliant banners,
Suspended in the infinite.
There, I wear the universe close to my skin,
No distant witness, anchored in vectored dimensionality.
The ship thrums on all sides, the view full-sphere:
no left, no up, no right
no down.
Suspended in the midst, my motions guide
The sleet motions of the craft—the perfect
Union of machine with muscle with mind.

What does it mean to you, centering yourself
for a vortex-plunge at CrossPoint?
Knowing the forces would shred you across the dead-cold night,
Yet are held at bay by your body that writhes
through singularity,
Navigating the narrow margins
like a dolphin
holding that aerial arabesque
while eternity wraps itself around you.

Or else there is this:
The passivity of watching.
How can you trust yourself to this exchange?
As once you coiled within the cockpit
And commanded the celestial spheres.
They rushed up in radiant waves to embrace you.
You hurled yourself heavenward and the hands
Of God caught you and spun you further upward
Like a parent exulting in her star-eyed child.

Or else there is this:
This retreat to settle.
How does a flame settle and not extinguish?
How does the solar wind settle and not perish?
How does a heart settle without slow death?
This is what time carves out of mortality,
This need to nest in eventuality.
To designate home and
At once and finally
Land.

Someday such need will overwhelm me,
One run across the stars,
and my soul will cringe from vast spaces
and I will regret this seaside goodbye.

Until then, let me be the one to slice open the sky.