Flying Over Arizona at 9:00 PM
Flying Over Arizona at 9:00 PM
By Oleander Grey
There is a squirming stretch of pulsing points of light, winding and winking up at me from sixty thousand feet below me. The lightning is rusty here, striking the dry towns from grimy peach clouds, sending shocks of heat and light into the void. Inky, geometrical patches of darkness interrupt the polygons of light; desert or water, it wouldn't make a difference. Dots of light like smattering from a paintbrush, like boats on a vast ocean, clustered and so alone all in one. Highways across the desolate stretch become bridges and city blocks, the suburbs; the shopping centers become islands, individuals and a unit, isolated and closer than I can imagine.
A freeway, like a snail trail, crawls and creeps into oblivion, taking travelers on its way as they come and go and leave their homes and return to them. Is this a poem? I don't know. Darkness swallows the roads now, the lightning, the islands, the bridges. The desert no longer resembles an ocean but the cosmos, the lonely homes and rest stops in the sand sparkling like stars, making shapes like constellations and reflecting what I see skyward.
All that remains is that snail trail, like the tendril of a jellyfish, and the travelers, only sluggish, glowing points, oh so faintly breaking the darkness. They are loving and grieving and rejoicing and fearing, all in ways I cannot fathom, ways that would render me apart like paper if I ever tried to understand wholly. And when the front wheels hit the tarmac in sixty minutes and I step out into the cool night air of Los Angeles, I rejoin them, another part of a point of light that may (or may not) make a stray passenger of some unfamiliar airplane wonder, who are they? Who am I?
