A helicopter took off on Mars, yesterday,
and landed too–the important bit. Flight
is the grey space, the distance between
two points, takeoff, landing, but it isn’t flight
without those two bookends–it’s nothing,
or a fall.
Today, we walked Highland Park,
the liminal space of city limits, big LA
melting into the scrabbly hills, houses
built into slopes. The front gardens are terraced,
level by level, trees growing in a place
unmade and remade so they might live–
the Incas, too, cut fields into mountainsides,
crops on the stone switchbacks of the Andes.
The scenery changes, but human ingenuity
never does–here we are, living, somewhere
we are not meant to live; flying, somewhere
we are not meant to fly.
It is what we have always done.
Still, baby bird, don’t jump
out of the nest too soon. A helicopter rises up high
over the red dirt of a cold red planet
and looks down at a landscape where nothing grows
but possibility and Curiosity,
and then it touches down. Takeoff, landing.
For the first time we’ve learned to fly
somewhere we have not, yet,
learned to live.
