Treehouse

Charles Byrne

I’m not saying
we turn this plane around.
I’m just saying I’m not comfortable
seeing the great wing-slabs flexing
through the suspiciously thin-glassed
window, or the attendant wound like a top
since flying became the bus travel of the sky,
since planes became missiles of terror –
or our ascent’s stray Canada goose escort
who seemed to be eyeing the engine
as though it contained the lost
edenic fields of golden grass.

Yet it’s not the dying so much as the leaving behind
the ground, veiled now by the clouds, that requires faith
and requires science, which are different only maybe
in some way I don’t understand, and both of which,
it appears, I have chosen not to believe in.

.

Charles Byrne is a poet and philosopher living in San Francisco, with recent or forthcoming publications in Clarion, Emrys, and Poetry Quarterly.

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