This is a book. 
This is a film. 
This is night.

- Marguerite Duras, The North China Lover

This is a commuter flight with M, who is fifteen and old enough to declare that she hates flying.

We taxi down the runway and stop at the end.

When the engines rev up, M flinches. I remind her what my mother used to tell me, namely, that the pilots have checked almost every single part of the plane and we are ready to rotate.

Reluctantly seated across the airplane aisle from me, M's eyes widen with concern. Her lips have blanched like that wicked asparagus served at fine restaurants. Her mouth is whiter than the froth rimming an ocean wave.

"Mom, I just can't do this," she whispers. 

I start to explain how her grandmother (my mother, my mother, where the hell is my mother) got her pilot’s license at night without telling us, and this was how she dealt with her fear of flying— by learning how to fly— but M is trembling now. Her knees are shaking as the plane begins racing down the runway for take-off. Reaching towards a space outside myself, I lean over and rub M's hand and explain how the layers of air resemble the layers of water. (Do I smile? I hate flying—) I smile brightly at M while repositioning my legs (which now occupy a portion of the aisle) so as to rub her shoulders and coax her mind from the plane's preposterous bucking-motion. The cadaverously-loud engines dialogue with the quivering chairs. (Do I make a joke about a horse?) There is that foolish woman again (me) with bite marks on her eye-glasses, (God, I miss Radu) talking at 100 mph about oceans, water, boats the way sound is altered by pressure, the way it takes time to find a cruising altitude – that woman never stops smiling, just as the child in me never stops watching her — this mother I have become, this human who knows she will die in an airplane, and yet flies as much as she can, as if knowledge is a thing which can be shattered.

If the foolish woman with the crazy glasses is correct, she is simply assuming the name of her death is written. But the name is not the date. It is not an excuse to die. — So we fly. M's eyes scrunched shut, her hands clammy, her lips whispering no no no as if she knows what it’s about to happen— and me, becoming the mother I had, the mother I needed, the mother whose own fear of flying led her to night school for a pilot's license, the mother who held my hand during takeoff and landing while extolling the brilliance of Pascal's wager.

When cruising altitude is achieved, M seems calmer.

“I’m okay,” she whispers, checking to make sure no one notices.

I turn to my attention to Megan O'Gieblyn's "The Life of the Mind,” an intriguing review of Martin Riker's book, The Guest Lecture, “a novel of ideas” which I ordered immediately.

Riker was an associate Director at Dalkey archives, and he co-founded the Dorothy Project with his wife, Daniel Dutton. But he writes the female protagonist, Abby, without maudlin or hysteria. Abby suffers from a "spiraling self-pity. . .  continually dialogue with an ambient guilt," which O'Gieblyn links to a possible dread of the "Twitter mob." I wonder if the The Guest Lecture's descriptions of utopia will align with Mark Fisher's resistance to capitalist realism in focusing on the importance of envisioning and imagining a capacious Rather than a definitive Otherwise. I savor the wondering feeling in relation to a book I haven’t read yet.

And then the seatbelt signs turn on.

The pilot says “moderate turbulence.”

The small commuter airplane bounces until all the faces go gray.

The eyes of others resemble corner-sharpening comets scouring the tunnel for a stable spot to land. 

“I’d rather take in this sunlight like a dog,” wrote Ana Božičević in the poem titled “War on a Lunchbreak.”

I hold M’s hand and talk about the whether (the whether, the and-if, the then-again) again. I embroider bracelets of conditionals to distract her from the cloud-rodeo. I use language to lure her elsewhere. I pour verbs into shiny decanters and present them as solid talismans. I do my best with the mouth I’ve been given.

Eventually—between twitter-dread, M's terror, and various Sapphic fragments—our winged metal tube descends into the horse-haunted airport of Denver, Colorado, and rumbles down the long, asphalt belt. The zombie in me picks up the slack and thanks the pilot as we deplane.

Once M and I reach the airport, a teen in a green jacket, flanked by a coalition that is likely a kin group, runs up and delivers a phone to me: "You left this," he mutters, kindly, contingently.

And so I did. I left my plane on the phone. Chagrin and gratitude: my usual emotional palette upon landing and, once again, realizing I exited the plane in that bubble of distracted giddiness that guises the effort one expends in holding it all together, or the performance of wholeness. 

“You need to thank him,” M nudges.

And so I do, did, etc.

And then, while M smiles at the teen in green, I reconsider our flight from the safe distance provided by five minutes and realize it is not the sort of scene one might find in a novel or short story. Our flight must be filed in the column of things-for-which-friends-prescribe-therapy, and this conflation between therapy and novels recalls the texture of being written into a book by Miguel de Unamuno, or included in his view that the novel comes to be alone in a room, in the aloneness of a room . . . with a xeroxed print of the Angel of History on the all and the image of Walter Benjamin sitting near a broken wing, dragging his pen over paper to remind us:  "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."

Death, Is All

by Ana Božičević

I woke up real early to write about death (the lake through the trees) from
the angle of the angel. There’s the kind of angel that when I say
Someone please push me out of the way
Of this bad poem like it was a bus.—well, it comes running &

tackles me and oh, it’s divine football—Or
in the dream when the transparent buses
came barreling towards us:—it was there. Half of all Americans say

they believe in angels. And why shouldn’t they.
If someone swoops in to tell them how death’s a fuzzy star that’s
full of bugles, well it’s a hell of a lot better
than what they see on TV: the surf much too warm for December, and roller coasters
full of the wounded and the subconscious
that keep pulling in—Who wants to believe

death’s just another life inside a box, tale-pale or more vivid?
Not me. Like in Gladiator, when they showed the cypresses
flanking the end-road—O set
Your sandal, your tandem bike, into the land of shadows—of course
I cried. Show me a cypress and I’ll just go off, but
I don’t want that to be it. Or
some kind of poem you can never find your way out of! And sometimes

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swam in it. See what I mean?
I see death, I smell death, it moves the hair on my face but

I don’t know where it blows from. And in its sources is my power.
I’m incredibly powerful in my ignorance. I’m incredible, like some kind of fuzzy star.
The nonsense of me is the nonsense of death, and
Oh look! Light through the trees on the lake:

the lake has the kind of calmness
my pupils’ surface believes...and this is just the thing
that the boxed land of shades at the end of the remote
doesn’t program for: the lake is so kind to me, Amy,
and I’ll be so kind to you, Amy, and so we’ll never die:
there’ll be plenty of us around to
keep casting our inquiry
against the crisp light. Light is all like,
what’s up, I’m here I’m an angel! & we’re
all: no you’re not, that doesn’t exist. We all laugh and laugh...

Or cry and cry. The point is, it’s words, and so’s
death. Even in that silence
there’s bird calls or meteors or something hurtling
through space: there’s matter and light. I’ve seen it
through the theater of the trees and it was beautiful

It cut my eyes and I didn’t even care
I already had the seeing taken care of. Even in the months I didn’t have
a single poem in me, I had this death and this love, and how’s
that not enough? I even have a quote:
Love is the angel

Which leads us into the shadow, di Prima.

from War on a Lunchbreak (Belladonna Chaplet)