Two Weeks Later

The first healing comes after

dark, away from the too-perfect

scenes of sun and blue. Clouds of an old rain scatter,

and the vault lies open and black. Among the waking

stars, one small cluster of

blinking lights spied creeping

across the sky, and I am a statue of forgotten joy,

witnessing June’s first fireflies or the Perseids of August,

breathing in the long

separation between sight

and sound, waiting. What puppeteer holds this

aerial bus aloft? Only the faith of a few

passengers defying our

national physics of fear.

The lights are almost off-stage when, from a distant corner,

the rumble comes. Sent by a ventriloquist, it presses

relentlessly on, though it can

never catch up with the airplane’s

body. Only months into making sentences, I chased

my parents’ words to understand this split world, how

a plane could fly ahead of its

roar when everything close-up

behaved so differently, voices in the hallway always

reaching me before a smiling face could

lift me from the crib and

ferry me through the air.

—Susan Middleton

Oct. 2001