Studying the Navigator – a Fantasy

for Ann Darr

I bought your book,
the one featuring pictures and your poems
about women flying airplanes,
and scanned for you in each foggy photo

until your thunder storm poem—
its fear sucked me five miles up
in a machine with—
unlike you, the woman who flew it—
a propensity for falling apart in shear air.

Later, after you’d managed it down,
feet grounded on gravel,
white morning glory scent zesting the hedge,
the white buzz of a wasp in the hot sun,
coffee brewing nearby—
and out west, over the Zuni Mountains
where you had been—
weren’t those thunderheads, bloody with sun
splendid?

Posted in response to the RPD daily word prompt zest. Ann Darr is a poet I met in a poetry writing workshop that she led at the Bethesda Writer’s Center. Ann flew B-52s and other aircraft during WWII. This poem appeared in an earlier version in Dazed Part of Light, by Lee Robison