Casting around in my fat file of unpublished poems for something I could post in my journal with photographs of a favorite plant, I found this one written a few months ago. It would be too great a stretch to try to say the photographs have anything at all to do with the poem...


PAY TO PLAY

On the plane from Washington to San Diego
The flight attendant pushes her drink cart,
the way her grandmother might have followed a plow
in late spring in an Arkansas bottomland by the river,
wishing she could be somewhere else, anywhere else.
Maybe she’s disappointed she didn’t take advice
from her mother and become a school teacher and
marry the preacher who offered not once but twice
to take her across the threshold to married bliss.

Maybe she is hung over from a night of partying
with yesterday’s cockpit crew and the smiling guy
who said he missed his flight home and had to be
an extra day in Washington, so why not, why not.
Hers is not exactly a Mona Lisa smile, when it comes,
but a stoic curling ever so slightly of her upper lip
on the right side, a kind of balance to the silver wings
pinned on her deep blue uniform above the left breast.

She spends her life going but never getting anywhere
near where she thought she wanted to be when he
said after choir practice one night with no one near
that he could take her to a new level of spirituality.
Promises made in church sometimes turn out to be
not quite reliable but something meant to seem
like the check’s in the mail or the money’s in the bank
when actually the deposit is of a kind that evaporates.
Life is a trip, her mother may have said “journey,” so
why not keep a gig where they pay you for doing what
all those other people in the cheap seats pay to play.