Aisle Seat

Oct 29 2012

It feels unnatural

the silence

between strangers

on a short-haul plane.

Tense, polite

unsure.

Your final destination,

the flight attendant chirps,

blissfully unaware

of irony.

The terminal

where you hurry up and wait,

the newly arrived

the late departed.

Where the comings and goings

will swallow you whole,

welcoming arms

reach out, enclose her.

You could say anything

be anyone

you dared.

But the arm-rest

is electrified,

the middle seat

unoccupied,

a no-man’s land

of unmapped mines.

Your sovereign principalities

defended well.

Her breath

fogging the window,

your legs

contorted, stretch.

The seatbelt sign

insistent chimes overhead,

a gentle nudge

her pale arm, bared.

She flinches erect

stares, uncomprehending.

You smile, your best.

Still, nothing is said.

Exotic plants, rare deer

have colonized the no-man’s land

between fortified states.

An exempt space

that has reverted to nature.

Full of animal spirits

skittish fear.

Which you saw

flit across

her face,

the wild-eyed stare

of prey.

Every day

deer die

in the feral beauty

of the DMZ.

They move so lightly

on long slender legs,

among hair-trigger mines

from a war we forget.

As if silence, eyes ahead

could ever protect.

I’ve travelled by air, and on occasion failed to converse with my seat mate. A polite nod, perhaps. It’s as if there is a critical interval of time, after which your sovereign silence becomes set in stone, and will not be broken.

As soon as I pictured this empty seat, and imagined it as a fortified border, I thought of the DMZ between the two Koreas; which has become, ironically, one of the great natural places on earth. Nature abhors a vacuum, and our absence has allowed this swath of unoccupied land  to completely revert.

So she has become a deer in that dangerous space:  skittish, delicate, easily startled.  And my silence --  my solitude, my solipsism, my illusion of self-sufficiency -- which I think keeps me safe, actually leaves me no less vulnerable. 

Oddly, the dog and I went for a walk as soon as the first draft was done. We followed a raucous murder of crows (what a delightfully apt collective noun!), which led us to a dead deer. We hadn’t come across a deer carcass like this for years.