Passenger
DOROTHY GILBERT
I look down the long wing Lighted by the whiteness Of dawn on the drifting clouds; Daylight has waked me.
The great wing bends groundward, Growing in the low light, And the dark Atlantic, that has lain under us, Under our sleep, all night, Lengthens and whitens like the back of a fish.
Somewhere in back of me some sleeper stirs As if in my own head, a curtain is drawn, And someone looks out, hoping to see land, Or to find some measure for his eyes, Something beside the plane that drones on upward, The turning wing, that now flashes sun
like a sword—
Gulls circling around the sand of a barren Brown island, alone, awash, would tell him Memory does not lie, that when we stand On the ground, we are taller than grass and flowers, That we have been lost in cities, frozen on mountains, That our life is a net, proportions.
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