Vol de nuit
To the Memory of AF447
Lost on the night of June 1st, 2009
Breathing, I, breathing,
Face-down, plummeting
Spread-eagle, plunging
Light-years, near-dead, hearing.
Are you there?
Who spoke, who asks? I lie, I lie.
With Samuel I reply, not I Lord, no, not I.
Here am I not, speak not,
Hear I cannot, screen, no, nor headphone.
Silent diving, clutch but fall
With shiner’s grace
Through endless urwald.
Tell me nothing! screech I.
Message never given
Cockpit cranium riven
Visitation. Eli shall die. And why?
Begone, by god! Tell him yourself!
No prophet I, no seer
No airy pulpiteer
No soapbox fox.
Art in heaven not here, no, neither,
Forgive us and here it comes now
Unbidden, no nightmare,
Flightwing cross my path.
Thunder rolls, divinity enters
Every vein, each orifice
Ravishing me, raping me midriff down
Unfastening my flesh and vanishing.
Clouds split, spit crystal ice
Deliver me, dear Christ, from freezing turbine
Bleating to no listener, listening to no poor bleeder.
Deliver them from my pillow!
Pater noster words flow
But no, no go
He rides on into me
Mastering, unmanning me.
Limbs stir but move not.
Dread too deep, stress
Darkness in and out
Of blinding un-sleep.
Beads tell, see them!
Prayer beads belted tight
In whispering fingers
Qui es in coelis…
Sanctificetur… but no response
And terror tremens
I am here with Eli
Never to return.
Stomach lurches, hurled hard down
One hundred foot
Then up, too steep, storm-tossed
His autopilot gone and pilot lost.
He hears me not.
Nose to gale, he stalls but knows it not
His basic training failed
He falls but fears me not.
In cubicle his captain sleeps.
Why wake him? Yet I try.
Forget me not! He gets me not.
His man too proud to ask.
Only begotten…and the Creed
Gushes from lips long dry
Resurrection of the body
Theirs and mine.
Nuns strapped
In corseted screams;
She calms she psalms
She names the storm.
Thumbs tweet networkless
Screens dead, phones dumb.
Clouds break and close.
He knows. He knows.
If he is there, he knows
Where they are bound.
Fiat hodie voluntas tuas
His will. Not mine.
But I am there.
In-flight, in flight.
With child beside me
And behind.
Their mother holds
Through thunder.
Passing weather.
Seated we sit
By hundreds down the aisle.
Adveniat regnum tuum
Thy kingdom, no, no coming
Deliver us, oh, just deliver.
They know. This wrong.
This turn, this time,
The time to learn,
If only.
Wake him, make him
Hear! What else
Is he there for?
Drop the nose!
Testing faith
And training his novitiates
The captain sleeps
Secure.
Not on his watch,
His Nelly. She too sleeps
Perhaps she dreams. He hears
Her not.
Wake up, I scream.
My captain and my Lord
Wake now. Wake me!
I cannot. Nor can he.
His pilot firm holds course
Severed from navigator logarithms,
Panic buttons, warning howls
Flashing dials and false alarms.
Man and matrix mashed, unmastered
Heavenly host disguises god absconded
Live on air from microphone.
‘A little turbulence,’ she murmurs.
Intercession void
Saints dead as asteroid
Hurtling past. No word
Spoken nor heard.
Strapped safe, fastened to you
Lord, jackets zipped.
Vertiginous trust, we dive.
A scream then hush.
‘Your shout’ she whispers
And he wakes, to seraphs
Riven with doubt,
Despair. Too late.
One glance.
His work is razed.
His instruments null
Their foresight wiped. Confounded.
Nous sommes morts
He knows it,
Seizing control
From disbelievers.
What controls?
Who rides this night?
Who steers this plane, who owns
This flight?
Pen that designed it,
Hands that stitched it,
Hangar that stored it
Captain that ditched it?
Or Lucifer that lit
And saw it, sees it
Now and seizes, hapless
Night lights flashing past
To break his fall. Thus vacuum-packed
I tumble, in-stressed pressure
Leaking like his wounds
Before the spear.
My fault, the grievous fault
Of my commission and omission
For I sleep it, wake it.
And each night
With Samuel I stutter:
Eli, you are lost. The lord is not,
Nor with you, nor shall not nothing utter.
Make your peace. For I cannot.
Nor should I know.
Nor have the right to show.
Nor have I pipes and taps to glow
With gas-fired coals of divination.
Voice came none to me
That night, to wake me.
Only the dead,
Their words recovered
Pouring from dusky portal
Where with Orpheus I enter at my peril,
Screen-gaze trespass, knowing is without return
And transcript is transgression.
Cerberus, it bites, it claws, it sticks.
Once read, twice damned.
With Lucifer I fall with them. Eternally.
Mind blazing into fiery extinction.
© Gareth Jones 2018
