FREQUENT FLYER

There's something intemperate in her knees, 
incorrigible the way her mind projects
the merest X or Y of an evening stroll
into the everlasting ozone of ideas.
Gap-toothed, but she's only lucky in travel.

"Bully for those priests of self-reliance.
I love them not.  If God had wanted a Unitarian,
my mind wouldn't make such mountains,
my body set such puny scaffolds.  No,
this suffering informs me I'm infinitarian."

To be loved as she is, nutbrown hair in clips,
by every boy-in-motion of her dreams,
would be to be half-loved so many times over.
Desire, her particular limp, makes her going clear.
Not one to creep and temporize in trains

of thought ("Never the way to go!"), she's off, 
though home is where she sees herself, a wife
and statuesque, as in the commonsense definition
of "idea"—that which one holds before herself
as she prepares to think, then thinks the same again.

—John Palmer

All rights to this poem belong to its author.

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