Missed Plane
Dec 8 2014


 All the people waiting for planes.

Angelic babies, swaddled in sleep,
only to scream
all the way to Milwaukee.

Men in suits, self-importantly tapping
on laptops and phones
on hard plastic seats
nailed to the floor.

The seasoned travellers
sprawling with backpacks,
the couples in love

all hands and tongue.

And me, hiding behind my book,
already in flight
to places unknown.

A poet
would have chosen a better name
than terminal.
The end of a trip, your final destination

in the same word

as a fatal disease.
Especially when planes come and go everyday
as glamorous as a bus station,
the routine of flight

as numbing as clockwork,

bleary-eyed folk
shuffling on, and off.

But no one lives
like there’s no tomorrow
in the departure lounge.
We wait,
wasting the minutes
putting-in time.

None of us think
we'll be the one
in the gut-wrenching plunge

to earth;
wings iced, engine on fire,

geese colliding

pressure lost.

We are fervent believers in flight.
In a heavy machine
in invisible air.
In a smooth return
to the dependable surface,
gliding in

to a concrete strip
and seamlessly touching down.
That gravity
is immaterial.
That fate has privileged
our precious lives.

But when I missed my plane
I couldn't help wondering
if it would be the one to fall,
breaking-up in a frozen forest,
ditched

in the cold black lake.
If bad luck
would somehow save me.
Or if it would be the later flight
that would drop off the radar,
which was never meant to be mine
was not my intended fate.
Righteous punishment

for being late.

Turns out
all the planes were safe.
My brush with mortality
still awaits,
contingent
on every breezy choice, all the minor mistakes
of daily life.

The book was a mystery
the crime was solved.
Stories like these
are irresistible;
of evil punished, justice triumphant,

order restored

to disrupted lives.

And sometimes
even real life
turns out fine.

There is announcement they make at airports, something about "your final destination". Of course, they're referring to connecting flights; but the ambiguity of final is striking. And I still can't help thinking about the unsuitability of such a term when, to some degree, we all fear flying. The same goes for "airport terminal". Perhaps words that imply definitive endings are best avoided anywhere near a lighter-than-air machine!

And when up in the air, strapped in, I inevitably think of how improbable this is; how what should seem miraculous so easily becomes mundane. I imagine the Wright brothers materializing here, less than a lifetime into the future, and how jaw-dropping the experience would be. It's sad that we can become so blasé about the truly extraordinary, how wonder has been replaced by the numbing routine of scheduled flight.

I did miss my plane. And as I tried to reframe my misfortune in order to see the half full glass, I couldn't help think such morbid thoughts; and then reproach myself for imagining a plane going down and all lives lost, simply to improve my morale! Of course, I then immediately thought the opposite: that 3 minutes of poor planning might have led me to step from a routine flight into a terror-filled end. This theme of the contingency of life is frequent in my writing: the small choices we constantly make (or are made for us), which are as unknowing and unpredictable as stepping off the sidewalk a little more to the left.

I didn't bury my nose in a book as I waited in the departure lounge; I read and emailed on my tablet. And I don't read mysteries. But there is always someone with a paperback; so even though I ended up using the first person here, I decided to make it a crime novel. Because it's always light reading in airports. And because P.D. James recently died, giving rise to lots of talk about the universal attraction of that genre: in which the fabric of a community is torn, lives disrupted; only to have order restored in a pleasing conclusion that -- so unlike real life – neatly resolves all the loose ends. Which is what happened here: all that worry and stress ...and then life went on, indifferent (all, that is, for the 75 bucks it cost me to change flights!)

Not only have I never been to Milwaukee, I was flying in the opposite direction. But somehow Milwaukee came to me, and seemed perfect here: a mid-size mid-western city that seems the epitome of average. And who ever thinks about an airport in Milwaukee, let alone taking a plane there? I think an unnecessarily specific reference that comes out of nowhere is refreshingly perplexing; and a bit of fun for the reader as well as for me.