Old Plane Crash
Pike National Forest, Colorado

Old Plane Crash

The most urgent priorities
don't leave direct evidence:

ivoried teeth and bones
or urgent love notes from the dying.

But this peeled, rusted skin
this blasted glass a glittering dirge

these bent steel limbs, snarled wire brains
half-sunken, fanned down the slope

dredge memories not actually
remembered, but somehow reminiscent

of sad probability, of Jonah drowned
of whales mired dry without reason:

of man washed gasping from the sky
never to return.