Aloft Poem by Greg Bell

having taken the controls for two hours
(What! ?Oh, no, I never.But I did...How
could I resist?)
Hear the hum, feel the grace of this machine -
this offspring of combustion and
calipered imaginings -
Ride the bubbling currents of the air
(just a little light chop, they say
in aeronautics)
Mogollons and Gila Wilderness to the right
Shakespeare Ghost Town below, and reaching
away to the left
is Mexico

Scrub desert beneath is everywhere
dry as tinder in the growing drought

And big air

that is the all
the everything
and the nothing

between us and terra firma










3,000 feet below