Holding Pattern

Poetry is a way of counting, sisters, it is acquisitive.
I try to find something to hold on to, laid up in heaven.

Held down, ill at ease, but blameless, I meet no one in the
air,
in terrible anticipation to walk

with you, paper-soled
women, into the brick learning places and open-windowed

rooms. So it is eternal—
this aught that we believe to be a high degree of order

with the controlled suspense of the sun. As I circle you
you hold your crosses sacred, those four straight routes

that draw off pain and that lightning body they ground.
I began with a line

hardly a pardonable sin in my book. How much should you
see
of yourself, or say? Sometimes I want to be told

what is great.
“We have developed a slight technical difficulty

and may not be able to land without a mechanic.”
We are in the habit of writing, and any power we may

derive from each other’s company will circle quietly
over the page, complicated as what we don’t see

but the pilot knows.
In whatever space we fly by our own mettle

with words that count much as friends
and with a heightened sense of where it all ends.