Winning
“An American balloonist has abandoned his attempt to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a boat suspended by almost 400 balloons after experiencing technical problems over Newfoundland.”— CTV News, Sept. 12, 2013.
These days, I sit on my ass in total
air supremacy. High in the saddle,
I practise my thousand-yard stare. I was
down, at odds with the world. Now, I’m up
to my eyes in sky, head above water,
taller. I’ve given myself over to the laggardly
drift of it, the feather-light yomp of it,
the self-contented milk run of it all. Long
story short, I want to make a life’s work
of floating to the top, held in thrall
by candy-coloured cogs in the claw
of blustery gearings. What they say
is true: from this orbit, the view’s to die for.
A Sun which oer the renovated scene
Shall dart like Truth where Falshood
yet has been, wrote Shelley, agog
over his own aeronautical ops. And can
you blame him? With the sum
of my parts a steampunk pleasure craft,
hard not to boast how awesome it is,
despite the bad legroom, to have my fill
of the firmament, like some Edwardian
adrenaline-junkie running the gauntlet
of rooftops, perfume-soaked kerchief
pressed to his nose. I figure
I earned it. For years, I’d managed nothing
more than weighing my options, my mettle
tested against whatever might steady me.
I’m clear of all that. I climbed and climbed
as if bounding the stairs by twos and threes,
and now, with a foothold, I feel, pound for pound,
as giddy as a plate spinning on a broomstick
balanced on the world’s nose. Before long,
I’ll realize that, like a conclusion too eagerly
jumped to, I’ve missed the whole point,
and will need to take the situation
in hand, bring my luck down a notch.
But at the moment, mediagenic,
crescent-mooned against the blue, I’m totally
into this, freeloading at the prow
of a sardine-tin unit of one.
The best part? Everything around me
a backdrop to the cargo of myself,
a brand of hands-free canoeing where I plot a course
using whatever the breeze is brewing.
Years hence, tell them I threw my lot in with
the hammocked buoyancy of upheld
gravity. Tell them I married horsepowerlessness
to helium. Tell them I was an expat
of Earth, yawed by a g-force
equivalent to hundreds of rubber bands
sprung free at once. It was
a scream. Time and again, the festoonery
tugged at my heartstrings. At sea in this
door-knocker of a bird house,
this straphanger of a crow’s nest, I’m a guy
guyed to the very limb he’s out on, afraid
of ending up at the end with nothing
but a swan song, the tale of a dream
that strung me along. I’m a guy looking
for a safe place to come to grief. Until then,
cloud-slow, I lord over the same freeze-framed
stretch of coast. I wave to no one.