A Motor

The heavy, wet, guttural small-plane engine fights for air, and goes down in humid darkness about where the airport should be. I take a lot for granted, not pleased to be living under the phlegm- soaked, gaseous, foggy and irradiated heavens whose angels wear collars in propjets and live elsewhere in Clean Zones, but figuring the air is full of sorrows. I don’t blame the quick use of the entire earth on the boozy pilot come down to get a dose of cobalt for his cancer. He’s got a little life left, if he doesn’t have to take all day to reach it. With the black patches inside him, and the scars and the streaks and the sick stomach, his life is more and more like that of the lowliest child chimney sweep in the mind of the great insensible, William Blake. William Blake, the repeated one, Blake, half mad, half remembered, who knew his anatomy, down to the little-observed muscle in the shoulder that lifts the wing. The little London chimney sweeper reaches up and reaches down. In his back, every vertebra is separated from the long hours of stretching. With one deep, tired breath, the lungs go black. By the Holiday Company crane, adding a level to the hospital, on the highest land in the county, heavy sits the pure-white Air Care helicopter, with its bulging eye. It has kept many going, a good buy, something. Now someone I know says Blake in anger, angry for his brother in the factory and his sister on the ward, but tonight I have no more anger than the muscle that lifts my knee when I walk. Another pleads with the ocean that the words for suffering and trouble take place in a sound that will be all sounds and in the tidal roll of all our lives and every event, but I am silent by water, and am less to such power than a failed lung. And I think it is only a clever trick to know that one thing may be contained in another. Hence, Blake in the sweep, one in the ground in one in the air, myself in the clinic for runaway cells, now and later.