Still Life

I’ve read the accident report—

It started like that first stitch in a sweater
nibbled by wool moths’ invisible larvae (worms,
tubes of thoughtless digestion)
a hole hardly large enough
for my finger to make it bigger:

red lubricant subbed for green;
too many flight-hours without oversight;
not enough man-hours with the grease gun.
Compounding, they stripped

the tail fin’s acme nut over the Pacific
where the jackscrew, long as my husband’s arm
and raveled round now with steel threads
like pencil shavings in a sharpener,
couldn’t level flight 261.
The tail fin lifting dropped the nose cone
and the plane wheeled onto its back,
a whale plunging to reach the seabed.

Sudden, but not fast.

Time enough to help adjust a neighbor’s oxygen.
To notice the eczema blazing in a steward’s elbow.
To hear someone shout I knew it I knew it
as all the details, every pearl
that made up the world, came unstrung.

Since Blue Birds we’d been friends,
through Harriet the Spy, the Doobie Brothers,
alibiing each other’s trysts, to late suppers
with her parents, a couple neither grave nor wise
except as certain paintings are wise
in the achievement of a composed private life.
Rare French brandy on New Year’s Eve,
the kick of salt-packed anchovies
with cold butter, orange tulips
in a blue, bubbled Mexican tumbler—
they’d turn an accumulation of facts
into the intimate, immaculate moment

as a still life’s meeting of objects and hours
are assembled by the artist for my delight.
These attentions, the pleasures of the table
shared—all the work done, invisibly—
could rescue a soul sullened by striving.

Time enough, then, for her parents
to become that single body they’ll all share,
blood awash in fear, their body straining to rise
as the plane drops and the pressure change
spikes the skull’s tender bays, its bony hollows
around the nose, behind the eyes
hormones fully dilate to take in all the light.

I didn’t make it to their memorial.
Now nearly the age her parents were
we’ve grown apart, my friend and I.
After twenty-two years I’ve read the accident report:

Sleeplessly as rust is how we’re brought
to adopt purposes not our own,
retool our restraining fixtures and shift
over years, like a debt postponed,
the crucial measurement in our wear point
by unintentional yet lethal degrees.

One weekend we drove to the tulip fields.
Long stripes of orange, pink, yellow, and red,
some nearly black; aloof flowers
I’ve never liked. I might have been
bored or thinking about work. Everyone had turned
away, it must’ve been almost lunchtime,
when a field of white tulips
rose, brightening air suddenly auspicious
with flowers. Swirling, they climbed,
lapsed, rose again, and reaching their high,
narrow lanes, rowing north, the snow geese
dropped me lightly back into myself,
mute witness to a sign I couldn’t interpret.

Like wreckage from the sea
that day will sometimes rise in me,
dripping, corroded, barnacled,
and while I’m two decades too late for an elegy,
I’ll buy a dozen tulips—mauve
as the skin around tired eyes, or red ones
with their black, dilated centers—
the color doesn’t matter.

The clock of their petals unwinding,
they set nothing in motion but themselves,
every change, each sweet, uneven divagation
of stem is a legacy of feeling—
like tonight, one still upright as in life,
another dipping its long neck
as if to pour its hair along the ground.