DESCENDING INTO SAINT LOUIS
I got alot of poems out of that trip to visit Chris & Kim in California back in 98.
The flight I took out there laid over in St., Louis, both ways. This is a description of the first layover. It was actually one of the scarier landings I've had, nothing terribly traumatic, just rather uncomfortable. The sky was slug gray, cloudy, 0 visability; I was sitting in the middle seat in a group of 3 (which I hate), and staring out the window past the woman seated next to me, savoring the uncertainty and scariness of the descent. The last four lines of the poem came to me, more or less whole, and I was about to scramble for something to write them down on when I suddenly became acutely aware that the woman in the window seat thought I was staring at her breasts. At which point, naturally, I looked at her breasts, more or less unconsciously. For a moment I was embarassed, and then I fell into the standard dodge that it was her fault I was looking at her breasts-- she dressed them up, after all!
So I didn't write down those last four lines. A couple of months later I found myself thinking of them again, and I started messing around with this. The first version was awful, full of "BEHOLD, I AM A POET ON AN AEROPLANE!" type stuff, and the airbrushed yuppie wife came off as a real harlot; this is more or less the second version, and I think we both come off alot better.
On the flight back, after the St. Louis connection, I sat next to a dark haired college student; towards the end of the flight, on the strength of an incredibly mediocre Sutter Home Cabernet Sauvignon and a strong admixture of fatigue and relief, I struck up a conversation, during which, under my direct interrogation, she said she wanted to like poetry, but she had never enjoyed reading it enough to read enough of it to say that she understood it. (She said it just like that, too.) So I gave her a slim Ferlinghetti promotional volume I had bought at City Lights for 5 bucks. It seemed the gracious thing to do.
One last thing: not that anyone's ever noticed, but for the longest time I had the quote at the top wrong, and I just kind of told myself that it was okay to paraphrase a movie. In November 2000, for my 35th birthday, my wife got me a copy of the videotape, so the next time I found myself watching the flick I made a point of writing down the actual, 2-part dialog, word for word. (THAT's how big a geek I am.)