Thoughts from a landing airplane

To the right: all of Manhattan

in the soft yellow light, with

bridges built over the water

and boats with little white tails

moving slowly up the rivers.

 

To the left: the miles of metal

piping and rusted out railyards

of the northern Jersey shore,

million-dollar monopoly houses

that grow details as we sink

closer to the earth.

 

Ahead there is the airstrip,

where seven or eight fat bellied

planes taxi foward on delicate

feet. They move as one, as a

herd of elephants walk or as a

fat family walks around a zoo:

 

   The dad has a splotchy red face

and an uneven scratchy goatee. The wife's

stringy blonde hair grows past her

shoulders. The kids have sticky dolls in

their hands and eat candy out their

pockets. They watch with a

superior air as the monkeys screech,

as monkeys jump on one other

in their metal cages.

 

Reviews

[G. Cedillo]

devastating - a slap of heartbreak, the human sickness here, too wreathed in shame and degradation - we are not worth the monkeys we cage? still, we can fly! And some do too, perhaps, soar. Hmmm, this needs revisiting - remember that famous maxim, "...recollected in tranquillity." Wordsworth, ya' know, and poetry. Think on't.
(g)