The Immortal Pilots

The noise throws down twin shadows, hunting shadows on a black joy ride. They roar up the silver vein of the river and out over the stony peaks, which have been shrunken to a luminous green musculature on the screens. Who are the pilots, too high to see the splayed hearts of deer tracks under the apple trees, or smell the cider in the fallen fruit? Who are the vandals that ransack the wilderness of clouds? Below them, a thin froth of waterfall spills from a rock face. They see its sudden wreckage, its yielding gouts, and the wind tear into the papery leaves of the poplars, roughing them up so the undersides show— a glimpse of paleness like a glimpse of underwear. The pilots are young men, and still immortal. Already in the cold quadrants of their hearts they imagine the whole world flowering beneath them. It feels like love, like being with a woman who flowers beneath them, so that they wonder how it would feel to go on riding the young green world that way, to a climax of spectral light.