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Prayer for Travelers

Leah Falk

Night goes back into the body as it crosses the Atlantic,

carrying secret speech, a song sung between presidents.

 

The plane crosses one of many internationally-agreed-upon shores

between twilight and dusk, refuels with the night that only happens

 

in the middle of the ocean, which no one is using right now.

A flight attendant offers me ocean-night in a plastic cup, no ice. No wonder

 

my skin feels so dry, no wonder I dream like a child, open-mouthed.

The pilot does this so amid the ocean’s constant swallowing

 

daylight may come, remind the ocean of its relative endlessness,

which, being blind, it never forgets.

 

No wonder my seatmate confesses: every night he drinks a whiskey

and narrates another part of his life story to a tape recorder.

 

Do I know I share a first name with the widow

of a prime minister whose country is at war with its own sun.

 

Widow who watched night vanish into her husband’s body on the sidewalk,

saw her life become west, a desert of day.

 

The attendant turns the lights out, and just then we remember

what we learned at birth: the big star that keeps us alive

 

is the tongue of a bell at noon, endlessly tolling

the mourner’s prayer. No wonder we gather

 

the night around us as long as we’re in the sky, loving how

it encrypts our bodies, refrigerates our grief.

 

 

Photo Credit Asher Isbrucker

 

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About Leah Falk

Leah Falk's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, FIELD, Blackbird, and other journals. In 2012 she won the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her song cycle "Book of Questions," written with composer Joshua Morris, will premiere in December 2015. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, she lives in New York.

Filed Under: Poetry

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