PORTAL

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

Outside of an airplane portal, the striated sunset burns against mountains, sandwiched between clouds and finally resolves in the satisfying depths of inky blue-black space. We are flying east, speeding past the sun’s finale. Each time I glance out the window, I think of how we cheat time and space as we are propelled in unnatural ways across the landscape. Quarters are cramped, my elbows pin against my side, so as not to disturb my neighbor. Glancing to the side, I watch the orange muddy against the mountains’ shadow.

In preparation for Issue No. 5 The Natural World is Everywhere, we filled our workshops with Mary Oliver poems. I treated myself to Devotions, a recent collection that like this airplane travels efficiently (in this case through the decades.) Oliver’s quiet work of observation and attention to language conjure the wild when read in these concrete cages. Week after week, her writing met the moment as we asked our writers to connect to the nature within — breath in deeply this very air and know that you are inhaling all that has been before, all that is to come. During January, February, and March, our writers are focusing their attention on the exercise of the dank loam of a forest floor, the taste of salt air, the crisp break of snow underfoot. Prison forces one to live in memory, to turn it around and around, to make it real. Since I am writing at this moment in the sky, we start here feeling the wind under our wings.

Patricia Norenberg’s If Only I Were An Eagle is a freedom proclamation. In November, she moved the needle from time yet to serve over to time left to serve. This descent is unique to each individual, it is the place where she feels confidently anticipates the autonomy ahead: “Feeling the wind beneath my wings, lifting me even higher.”

The Sun’s Horizon by Christopher Lewis leaves me at thinking of the swirling sunflowers painted by Vincent Van Gogh with colors so intently layered that we feel the visceral experience of those heady blooms. Lewis writes: “the sun’s horizon is like an artificial hologram in a painted world.” I reread his poem and check back into what feels like a televised sunset outside the plane.

DL Smith begins his poem Mr. Palomar Looks at the Moon with an epigraph from Italo Calvino: Nobody looks at the moon in the afternoon, and this is the moment when it would most require our attention, since its existence is still in doubt.

Smith writes: “existence is defined by its edges.” The boundaries of a life lived are defined by particular conditions of each existence. As I look through the airplane’s viewfinder, I see my reflection against black space. The time to write and think, and consider and rewrite, takes longer than the two minutes passed for you to read this passage. You are reading this long after the plane has landed. But right now, at this moment, the cabin has quieted as passengers search for the moon. | TDS