Flight Time

The hours of flight are hidden time,
inviolate somehow, exempt

from the insistence of the surface,
the holding down, always,

of one job or another—a slackening,
a wave from the terminal.

The levelling out, the steady drain
to quiescence of the felt world.

Tropopause. The abandonment at last
even of weather, the noise

threadbare now, and pieced together
from silences that show through.

Then six or seven nightward hours
with only the ideas of spin

and drift, the receding of the world
to elsewhere and nothing

further can be done, there is nothing
beyond your own closed skin.