Volplane

If you are alive as you encounter

This patterned language, and if you are one

Who considers life not a burden but

A privilege, then you are already

Highly privileged, at least with regard

To all the lives lived centuries ago

And most lives lived in the past century,

Which consumed themselves in the end and lost

The privileges you are now burning.

Whatever the engines were that hurled you

Into this atmosphere of awareness,

They’re cutting off soon enough. Try to glide.

One of living’s peculiarities

Is that, while everyone shares a planet,

There are enormous local differences

In the waves and weather, in their currents,

The supportiveness of their atmospheres.

It’s one reason why atmosphere alone

Seems like a poor basis for ruling out—

Or ruling in—life on other planets.

There’s a bounciness to small, thin-shelled worlds

And a pillowy depth to gas giants.

Europa even looks embryonic,

Egg veined with streaks as dark as lines of blood.

Who knows how long life might remain aloft

On any of those, once it got started?

But back to Earth. The surface is growing

Closer. You can see waves from the window.

You explain to your recalcitrant self,

Which has now begun spinning in circles,

There’s time to pull out of this foolishness,

Still time to extend a long, quiet glide,

To quit what you’re so often thinking but

Can never seem to well enough express.

To opine as you descend that all art

Is the product of the entirety

Of a person’s life seems both right and just

A bit ridiculous, as if to say

That all the ocean approaching below

Is the product of the entirety

Of a tsunami’s existence. It blooms,

Each wave, as you are about to blossom

Down there in the moment you rush toward.

There’s some event got that shock wave started—

Earthquake, undersea volcano, bomb test—

But art’s ocean only propagates it,

And the wave did not produce the ocean,

And not all of what went into making

Any wave, little or great, any splash,

Will go into the ocean. See them crash?

Level off above the spray of the foam.

There’s no entirety to anything

That breaks, not to a person, not to art,

Not to any ocean, surface, wave, flight.