• The states when they black out and lie there rolling when they turn
    To something transcontinental move by drawing moonlight out of the great
    One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip some sleeper next to
    An engine is groaning for coffee and there is faintly coming in
    Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks
    Of trays she rummages for a blanket and moves in her slim tailored
    Uniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew

    The door down with a silent blast from her lungs frozen she is black
    Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat
    The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something
    That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air
    Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation her hat
    Still on her arms and legs in no world and yet spaced also strangely
    With utter placid rightness on thin air taking her time she holds it
    In many places and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems
    To slow she develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body

    To watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her
    Self in low body-whistling wrapped intensely in all her dark dance-weight
    Coming down from a marvellous leap with the delaying, dumfounding ease
    Of a dream of being drawn like endless moonlight to the harvest soil
    Of a central state of one’s country with a great gradual warmth coming
    Over her floating finding more and more breath in what she has been using
    For breath as the levels become more human seeing clouds placed honestly
    Below her left and right riding slowly toward them she clasps it all
    To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways and
    Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide wider and suck
    All the heat from the cornfields can go down on her back with a feeling
    Of stupendous pillows stacked under her and can turn turn as to someone
    In bed smile, understood in darkness can go away slant slide
    Off tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread
    Or whirl madly on herself in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth
    Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon. There is time to live
    In superhuman health seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing
    An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving
    In a square town and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches
    The moon by its one shaken side scaled, roaming silver My God it is good
    And evil lying in one after another of all the positions for love
    Making dancing sleeping and now cloud wisps at her no
    Raincoat no matter all small towns brokenly brighter from inside
    Cloud she walks over them like rain bursts out to behold a Greyhound
    Bus shooting light through its sides it is the signal to go straight
    Down like a glorious diver then feet first her skirt stripped beautifully
    Up her face in fear-scented cloths her legs deliriously bare then
    Arms out she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great
    To take control of her trembles near feathers planes head-down
    The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head gold eyes the insight-
    eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops a taste for chicken overwhelming
    Her the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars
    Freight trains looped bridges enlarging the moon racing slowly
    Through all the curves of a river all the darks of the midwest blazing
    From above. A rabbit in a bush turns white the smothering chickens
    Huddle for over them there is still time for something to live
    With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop a hurtling a fall
    That is controlled that plummets as it wills turns gravity
    Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon shining
    New Powers there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing
    But the whole night time for her to remember to arrange her skirt
    Like a diagram of a bat tightly it guides her she has this flying-skin
    Made of garments and there are also those sky-divers on TV sailing
    In sunlight smiling under their goggles swapping batons back and forth
    And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving
    Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion white teeth nowhere
    She is screaming singing hymns her thin human wings spread out
    From her neat shoulders the air beast-crooning to her warbling
    And she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world now
    She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose
    And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up
    Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs if she fell
    Into water she might live like a diver cleaving perfect plunge

    Into another heavy silver unbreathable slowing saving
    Element: there is water there is time to perfect all the fine
    Points of diving feet together toes pointed hands shaped right
    To insert her into water like a needle to come out healthily dripping
    And be handed a Coca-Cola there they are there are the waters
    Of life the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir so let me begin
    To plane across the night air of Kansas opening my eyes superhumanly
    Bright to the damned moon opening the natural wings of my jacket
    By Don Loper moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water
    One cannot just fall just tumble screaming all that time one must use
    It she is now through with all through all clouds damp hair
    Straightened the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool revealing
    New darks new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos

    And night a gradual warming a new-made, inevitable world of one’s own
    Country a great stone of light in its waiting waters hold hold out
    For water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body
    And fly and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned
    Water stored up for her for years the arms of her jacket slipping
    Air up her sleeves to go all over her? What final things can be said
    Of one who starts her sheerly in her body in the high middle of night
    Air to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself
    Off to the right in Kansas? She goes toward the blazing-bare lake
    Her skirts neat her hands and face warmed more and more by the air
    Rising from pastures of beans and under her under chenille bedspreads
    The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding
    On the scratch-shining posts of the bed dreaming of female signs
    Of the moon male blood like iron of what is really said by the moan
    Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight passing
    Over brush fires burning out in silence on little hills and will wake
    To see the woman they should be struggling on the rooftree to become
    Stars: for her the ground is closer water is nearer she passes
    It then banks turns her sleeves fluttering differently as she rolls
    Out to face the east, where the sun shall come up from wheatfields she must
    Do something with water fly to it fall in it drink it rise
    From it but there is none left upon earth the clouds have drunk it back
    The plants have sucked it down there are standing toward her only
    The common fields of death she comes back from flying to falling
    Returns to a powerful cry the silent scream with which she blew down
    The coupled door of the airliner nearly nearly losing hold
    Of what she has done remembers remembers the shape at the heart
    Of cloud fashionably swirling remembers she still has time to die
    Beyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour
    Of cornfields and have enough time to kick off her one remaining
    Shoe with the toes of the other foot to unhook her stockings
    With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair
    Near death when the body will assume without effort any position
    Except the one that will sustain it enable it to rise live
    Not die nine farms hover close widen eight of them separate, leaving
    One in the middle then the fields of that farm do the same there is no
    Way to back off from her chosen ground but she sheds the jacket
    With its silver sad impotent wings sheds the bat’s guiding tailpiece
    Of her skirt the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse the intimate
    Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost
    Of a virgin sheds the long windsocks of her stockings absurd
    Brassiere then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming
    Off her: no longer monobuttocked she feels the girdle flutter shake
    In her hand and float upward her clothes rising off her ascending
    Into cloud and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe
    Like a dumb bird and now will drop in SOON now will drop

    In like this the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas down from all
    Heights all levels of American breath layered in the lungs from the frail
    Chill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly
    And breathes like rich farmers counting: will come along them after
    Her last superhuman act the last slow careful passing of her hands
    All over her unharmed body desired by every sleeper in his dream:
    Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart’s blood
    Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves
    Arisen at sunrise the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn
    Toward clouds all feel something pass over them as she passes
    Her palms over her long legs her small breasts and deeply between
    Her thighs her hair shot loose from all pins streaming in the wind
    Of her body let her come openly trying at the last second to land
    On her back This is it THIS
    All those who find her impressed
    In the soft loam gone down driven well into the image of her body
    The furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep
    In her mortal outline in the earth as it is in cloud can tell nothing
    But that she is there inexplicable unquestionable and remember
    That something broke in them as well and began to live and die more
    When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth
    Caught her interrupted her maiden flight told her how to lie she cannot
    Turn go away cannot move cannot slide off it and assume another
    Position no sky-diver with any grin could save her hold her in his arms
    Plummet with her unfold above her his wedding silks she can no longer
    Mark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife
    Or the goddess in Norwegian farm girls or all the back-breaking whores
    Of Wichita. All the known air above her is not giving up quite one
    Breath it is all gone and yet not dead not anywhere else
    Quite lying still in the field on her back sensing the smells
    Of incessant growth try to lift her a little sight left in the corner
    Of one eye fading seeing something wave lies believing
    That she could have made it at the best part of her brief goddess
    State to water gone in headfirst come out smiling invulnerable
    Girl in a bathing-suit ad but she is lying like a sunbather at the last
    Of moonlight half-buried in her impact on the earth not far
    From a railroad trestle a water tank she could see if she could
    Raise her head from her modest hole with her clothes beginning
    To come down all over Kansas into bushes on the dewy sixth green
    Of a golf course one shoe her girdle coming down fantastically
    On a clothesline, where it belongs her blouse on a lightning rod:

    Lies in the fields in this field on her broken back as though on
    A cloud she cannot drop through while farmers sleepwalk without
    Their women from houses a walk like falling toward the far waters
    Of life in moonlight toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms
    Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands that tragic cost
    Feels herself go go toward go outward breathes at last fully
    Not and tries less once tries tries AH, GOD—