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I write poetry not for publication but merely to kill time. Airplanes are a good place to write poetry and then firmly throw it away. My collected works are mainly on the vomit bags of Pan American and TWA.
Charles McCabe
For reasons known only to the back of my brain (saving paper in my tiny notebook?), this dispatch, written on the plane, is coming out in rhyme. It started off as a parody of Robert Service's "The Trail of Ninety-Eight," as the first line shows, but somehow got taken over by the rhythms (and rhyme techniques) of Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine", and the way of mixing high and low in the service of storytelling that is crude and totally mine.
Spain! - we sprang from our lecture seats; Spain! --- back went my Aeron chair.
Our paperless paperwork was complete; tonight we take to the air.
Every three years this happens to me, between jet-engined wings,
Going east, east again over the sea that had drowned Atlantean kings.
We waited in a crowded hall for the gates; Spaniards argued and babies wept;
From the linguistics school I'd done in the States, I read the monograph I'd kept.
(Yes, crazy thing for a girl to do, but a warning I won't repeat:
You already know I'm the woman who'd rather research than actually _eat_.)
It had been so long since I'd been in a wide-bodied aircraft, I almost knew
That they're bigger inside than they are outside, like the TARDIS of Doctor Who.
Alas, I can't sleep in the seat of a plane, though I twist my spine into place;
The hours crawl by in sleepless pain, and I await the black snake's embrace.
The hour was late in the East that night; the turbulence we met was high.
We checked for the wingtip's cheerful light as winds tossed us across the sky.
The flight directors and pilots knew in three languages to reassure.
(The prosody, and phonetics too, of their Spanish, alas, were poor.)
We get breakfast at three on my body's clock; sleep was scratched as a no show.
My brother slid the porthole shade unlocked, and we looked at the sky below.
(From appearances, the name of the flick on TV is "Too Many Subplots For Its Own Good";
Since the times in-flight headsets had been free I got none, but this I understood.)
Notes: I do not actually own an Aeron chair.
Ok, we're in Madrid, in our hotel, I've slept for about four hours, and then we went and had adventures in the saga of European wireless Internet. Our Internet is not yet guaranteed.
I wish you joy.
Charles McCabe
For reasons known only to the back of my brain (saving paper in my tiny notebook?), this dispatch, written on the plane, is coming out in rhyme. It started off as a parody of Robert Service's "The Trail of Ninety-Eight," as the first line shows, but somehow got taken over by the rhythms (and rhyme techniques) of Algernon Charles Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine", and the way of mixing high and low in the service of storytelling that is crude and totally mine.
Spain! - we sprang from our lecture seats; Spain! --- back went my Aeron chair.
Our paperless paperwork was complete; tonight we take to the air.
Every three years this happens to me, between jet-engined wings,
Going east, east again over the sea that had drowned Atlantean kings.
We waited in a crowded hall for the gates; Spaniards argued and babies wept;
From the linguistics school I'd done in the States, I read the monograph I'd kept.
(Yes, crazy thing for a girl to do, but a warning I won't repeat:
You already know I'm the woman who'd rather research than actually _eat_.)
It had been so long since I'd been in a wide-bodied aircraft, I almost knew
That they're bigger inside than they are outside, like the TARDIS of Doctor Who.
Alas, I can't sleep in the seat of a plane, though I twist my spine into place;
The hours crawl by in sleepless pain, and I await the black snake's embrace.
The hour was late in the East that night; the turbulence we met was high.
We checked for the wingtip's cheerful light as winds tossed us across the sky.
The flight directors and pilots knew in three languages to reassure.
(The prosody, and phonetics too, of their Spanish, alas, were poor.)
We get breakfast at three on my body's clock; sleep was scratched as a no show.
My brother slid the porthole shade unlocked, and we looked at the sky below.
(From appearances, the name of the flick on TV is "Too Many Subplots For Its Own Good";
Since the times in-flight headsets had been free I got none, but this I understood.)
Notes: I do not actually own an Aeron chair.
Ok, we're in Madrid, in our hotel, I've slept for about four hours, and then we went and had adventures in the saga of European wireless Internet. Our Internet is not yet guaranteed.
I wish you joy.
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