Translove Airlines by Marc Harshman

They were real clouds.

They were boring clouds.

We were in them.

We were bored.

We were expecting a quid pro quo

            ala Constable or Turner—we were

            over the Midlands, weren’t we?

And where was the Meissen china,

            the vintage Narcissus tea?

And weren’t we going first-class for the view?

And for that we needed movies,

            movement, movie-ment, at least,

            not modern art, not all this white,

            not Olson’s open field, not a tabula rasa

            of static snow, not these clouds.

We wanted moving color,

            we wanted to be

            flying in a green light,

            Technicolor, bright

            pigments of every hue but . . .

After they threw us out they wrote

            in the pilot’s log that

            we were thrown

            into a perfectly blue sky

            amidst twenty black clouds

            and we were of three faces

            each as white as a sheet.

Italicized lines from “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” Wallace Stevens