Composed Somewhere Higher Than Westminster Bridge

The plane takes off a little late.
The last of sunset on the left
blurs by us as we aim for night.
We bank into a sweeping turn
and tip toward earth; looking down,
I see them: lines of pinprick light,

a web of glint that overlies
a great vague circle, something like
a heart, the veined and beating kind.
I think: that mighty heart.   Someone
wrote that about a city once,
looking at it from bridge-deck height
in morning's smokeless, quiet sun.

No quiet reverence here, no peace.
These churned electric energies?
A little thing could wink them out
to blackness. And his other trope?
The place doth like a garment wear
a mail-shirt made of wire and flame,
consuming what it decorates—
extravagant bijouterie—
in jewel tones, some warm, some cool.

A net of gemstones, on a heart.
Utilities turned beautiful,
too briefly, by the thought of art.

The banked turn ends. We level, climb.
I set my watch to Central Time,
impatient for the beverage cart.

High

We were grounded for life: To be growing up
in the suburbs, when they were new,
was to live life on a single story:
rambler and ranch-style, in homes
neatly bagged in cul-de-sacs;
at schools, too, low-slung and sprawling
over assorted boxy annexes;
at our stolid red-brick churches;
at shopping malls, then just beginning
to extend their asphalt pseudopods
rectangularly over farms;
everywhere children could go,
life was flat, earthbound,

so that part of the rare delight
of visiting city relatives
was the rush of finally being somewhere,
anywhere, past the first floor.
Not until high school could we look
from windows into the nests in trees;
not until college could we live
on third floors and look out on rooftops.
And what rooftops! Gables, gambrels,
mansards, slate and shakes, clay tile,
federal-period chimney pots.
So when at last we owned a house
and looked, oh bliss, from an upstairs porch
to the shingled roofs of our city neighbors,
we knew it: we'd come up in the world.
Son and daughter, reared in this house,
when you return, as you briefly do,
what unimagined lines of sight
will have stunned you to fresh perspectives
so that to see us, you look down?