The sun licks a warm honey strike
Up the back of my head, heats the
Hair there like a hot coke you
Left in a closed car on a beach day;
Catches on my fingers, too
Curled fingers cushioning my skull away from
A plastic pressurized wall.

And it's peaceful, and misleading:
I could drowse believing my body
To be sleeping against the slattered
Windows of a San Francisco street-car

Until all at once the engines scream excitedly
And throw our little toothpaste-tube
Forward and, improbably, up

And that shadow on the
Water could be a toy plane
Surely we're bigger than that:
This close to the sun, we ought to
Shadow a city block

But above the cloud layer, we are
Nothing. The sun here burns so
Brightly it bakes the very sky
A hard, kiln blue, and I know now
Than man was made for the sky:

Clouds sitting like icebergs in this,
Apollo's lake, a more than adequate
Consolation prize, given the circumstances
That we will never have Antarctica

Down in the snow you won't find
Thin patches and thunderheads, anyway,
Drawing dragons and tracing cherubs
In the overdone meringue

But the ice flows pull together
And I lose all sense of scale
When I look away at the call of
"Peanuts, pretzels, M&M;'s,
Please keep your seatbelts on"

And for all the marvel outside,
I'm struck by this: how steady a desk
A seat-back tray makes.
And I put my notebook down for the
First time next to a
Remarkably unspilling coke
And I think, yes,
Man was made for the sky.