Flight path sounds so lovely—until one appears in your neighborhood. Then it’s more like that 80s Peruvian guerrilla group The Shining Path, launching a fresh assault every two minutes on silence, which is clearly an imperialist imposition. Though when it came to entertainment, the Senderistas would tolerate nothing but indigenous folk music. Or so I was told back in 1991 by a Peruvian punk rocker, who’d come all the way to the States to pursue his raucous dream. Me, I like heavy metal… but not necessarily the sleek bellies of Boeings and Airbuses coming in low over the house, wheels extended like the tiny claws on Tyrannosaurs, howling with the strain of deceleration and descent. Which I can sort of understand, you know? How much better to stay aloft and remote as a fluke in the bloodstream, its paths nearly infinite, however circumscribed by the exigencies of a living host.
a week of sun
in the far north
they wave at our train