Somewhere over Tulsa the pilot warns
we’re passing through a storm. Experienced
in flight, trusting the engineers who designed
and built this plane, we pop headphones back
in our ears, turn to our movies and TV even
as, out of habit or suppressed nerves, we
pull our seatbelts a little tighter, recalling,
perhaps, that story about that flight—was it
London to Singapore? So much of what transpires
on this populous, complicated world, reaches us
but briefly, like the wan light from a first-quarter
moon—where a passenger died. I am lost in some
forgettable show about a murder and a hardened detective
doing all he can to solve it, when my head is jostled
such that, out of the corner of my eye, I notice
flashes of brightness, each a nuclear blast rippling
through a miles-long arterial vein, eviscerate the perfect
darkness. I have never seen such color, a dozen bolts
of lightning, blueish-white and hotter than the sun, each
coming to life and dying in an instant, over and over
and over. I think of near-death experiences, how people
report seeing heaven, how fMRI has shown that
this is but a brain shutting down, how there are nearly
two hundred of us here, warm blood in our veins,
roughly alike in our need for love and wonder and the
prolongation of life, heads down, passing so close to
the great unknown, it could blind us in its glory.