The plane pivots on its wheels, on the runway, like a cannon butt pointing south. At once we are in the air, lifted, and the sun makes a shadow of our plane on the clouds, a cartoon-plane, and the sun makes halos around the plane, round rings of rainbows: we are in the bull’s eye. And below, the cranes by the shipyards are perched like long-necked dinosaurs, the homeless stirring in the dark beneath, their senses battered-dead, still alive.

The Earth is a map of wrinkled brows and tufts of hair, holes filled with gray and blue, pock-marks made by man. We are inside the shadow of the cartoon-plane and we are in the real plane, too. We carry on the currents a massive metal bird at the height of the horizon, mountains our play-things, the snow on the ridges just for show, made from foam, ours for the taking, hours before the show.

Categories: humor, travel

Tags: Arts, Earth, homeless, Las Vegas, man vs nature, poetry, prose, Seattle, technology