To Tom and Helen Ferril
Civilian for a pause of hours
With books and rooms and window flowers,
My uniform across a chair
And the alarm clock pointing there
To unalarmed and perfect noon
Served up in bed (if ending soon,
Held perfectly, colored like sleep,
And shadowless though moving deep.)
Like sleep, moved on a fluent fact
Too deep to need the static act
Of reason and the reasoned rise
Of commas and geometries–
Wakening delights a single thought:
The sun is up and I am not.
Goodmorning, then, with light prepared,
Almost a day ago. Light shared
By half the world before it made
This last turn through the window shade
And, after half a world, involved
John Ciardi in the thing revolved.
Goodmorning till another day
When morning comes another way,
And tooled and tallied past all thought
I am up and sun is not.
Switches thrown and levers dressed
Precisely right, and buttons pressed,
Motors checked and energized;
And then the hangar door surprised
As if a laminated shim
Took on the aura of a whim,
Or engines begged to be released
And like Moslems face the East
-Machines and morning fixed upon
The starting spectrum of the dawn.
P-51
It fills the sky like wind made visible
And given voice like drums through amplifiers,
Too great a terror to be lost on death
Remembering that all our dreams are fiers.
This terror, cannoned as the hawk is billed,
Taloned with lusty boys who love their toy,
Mounts on the living energy of grace
Whose passing cracks on burning lathes of joy.
Piston by piston the made fumes of flight
Frenzy the startled air her passing sears.
Fast as a head can turn from East to West
She summons distances and disappears.
That moment only—glancing up and gone
And see, her boy outburns the burning year.
And we are clod and pasture fixed upon
Her birth above the hills like a crowd’s cheer.
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