Old Ideas of Air Travel

I’m looking into a blue tarpaulin of sky

where the flecks in my vision ascend and glide

as if they were, too, the cloud-light dirigibles

that once traversed this pinch of hemisphere in record time,

and I think of when we lighted upon that fire balloon kit

in the sudden hangar of your father’s shed

its packaging venous as a pinned moth,

that we unpacked it and let the breeze bring it to life