Strange; Thoughts on AA 750--DFW to LGA

Must be the altitude...Also, before I post this, I have to announce...Finished my first draft of my chapbook today!

On the plane back to New York. I see the red line of sunset, the orange streak above it, onto light blue, dark, up into midnight. Lines and dots of lights down below. All of the lives, all of the people—it’s so gorgeous to me. And I love this plane, with so many strangers, sleeping. I feel loved, oddly, sitting here—loved and loving. I always feel this way on planes. The lights below are dimming, now. The land is stretching on into country. I can’t help but desire to lie down on the earth when I see it from this angle. That immediate gesture to roll about on land as a child, as a lover in bed. Do other’s feel this?

Keep thinking about intimacy. What is the root?

Beauty everywhere and everything, and how I search, still, for intimacy in the tiniest corners. In the woman sitting next to me, listening to her pink iPod (Norah Jones, I looked) and writing away in her notebook while I tap on in mine; in the man next to her, reading a novel, eyeglasses low on the bridge of his nose, white pressed shirt and tweed coat; in the two men sitting in front and on either side of the isle, heads back, mouths slightly open.

Am I simply sentimental? What of it? I could toss that word into the bin—honestly, it’s an enemy. Worry for nothing, useless.

Always, a state of newness, wonder. Let things go by in stampedes, or maybe just air, currents. I don’t know if time is in swirls, downward or up; could there be movement in an a sort of anti-direction, not a forward leaning thing…Round, everything round so that the sky’s belly kisses back into our arching length, so that to see one face in a crowd is to see your own. How to express this in words, or even music—sound is limited, as are words. I feel it in my body, though, more than any lover. I wish I could create it, too—stand there in the middle of my notes—if my body could be a note, one after another, if a lover could see them over the skin, hear whole melodies instead of seeing, touching—in last movements. This power could not be mine, ever, perhaps, without an opening up, a laying out—gathering? Hands undoing years of holding secrets.

I remember, how the hair on the head feels, tugged gently—whole body tingles down to feet and even on through the floor. How this is like cultivation, a practice in receiving, in being open. And all I need is to feel it in the gut, to relive it, allow it to grow up and around—feel someone’s touch even in solitude. Re-create softness. Open a taxi door and think only of this radiating glow—step over the railing and catch the nearest stranger’s eye.

Love isn’t something that labels, names, sequesters—how we try to though, how silly that we hoard and place-name love, colonize it, for some specific glory. The more our hearts remain open the deeper the roots must grow. Even in death, listen, that’s it. Death loves deeper because it needs to.

I want to learn to need like that—unselfish, blind, bold, imperfect, ill-timed, round, reaching up to include even our eyelids, even our guts, the fluids, strangest parts, intimate, that we never see…love even them because it refuses anything less than soil.