As the Sky Lowers -- Possible Ode to Gustave Whitehead*

Little finger-sized pieces of mulch
lie glazed on the asphalt

path. Blades of grass --
both green and brown -- stiffly

puncture melting ice making patches
of lacy shawls strewn

around the small yards.
The knuckle holes

in the sidewalk are drowned
mouths open to the sky and my

feet. Tires wetly roll
along the street. Is it me

or is the smell of wood
burnt by metal the same

as the aroma of cold
darkening days? And where is

the escape hatch from those
steel and glass casements where

people wait out their lives?
-- Among my footprints?

-- They are crinkled slicks
of water on the pavement

as if knowledge were at once
ephemeral, isolated, and tangled

in the roots of the unnoticed
and the extinct.

*Gustave Whitehead is sometimes mentioned as preceding Orville and Wilbur Wright in flight. Through modesty and a lack of self-promotion, his 1901 flights have not made the record books in the same way as the Wright brothers' 1903 flights. However, the Wright brothers' airplane serves as the paradigm on which modern aircraft are built, not Mr. Whitehead's folding-wing model.

Copyright Louise Robertson