Night Flights

Into the indigo sky the planes climb at regular intervals, like clean, slow-motion signal flares fired by a punctilious soldier fighting a decorous war. From this distance, the planes’ engines are little pendant earrings, swingless beneath ridiculous cantilevered ears, their screams muffled, straining furiously to hoist their ponderous freights into sky and night, locked in a slanted tug of war with a force unseen bent on reeling them back like renegade kites. For a few moments, the outcomes of the duels appear far from certain, the planes slow and labored on their ascent, seemingly disheartened by so much space. But they keep climbing, plowing dark furrows in dark cloddish sky, slipping gravity’s last rapacious grasp. They disappear behind shadowy fleece, edging them with with red and green lights, reappearing now and again in jagged tears in the cloud-quilt, sightings of mythical birds in surreptitious flight. Rising, rising, their lights recede, blink out, and are gone. The sight of these night planes always gives me the feeling I’m being left behind, by them, and by the spirit of Saint-Exupéry, that rider of ancient planes, that cloud-hopping wanderer entombed in a starry sky, foe of inertia who was privy to the danger of flying, and the greater danger of not going.