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The following poem was read by senior Will Dowd, representing Boston College at the resurrected Greater Boston Intercollegiate Poetry Festival (“Varsity Bards,” Spring 2006) on April 20, 2006.
We’d all heard tales of clamps or clots of gauze being sewn up
inside surgical patients, and couldn’t it be just a forgotten
wrench causing the rheumatic shudder of the left engine
as the wings rear over St. Augustine, casting a shattered
sunlight through the double-pane windows that is bright
but not warm, being so many times removed from its source?
The red-tailed hawks hover in the distance,
uplifted and forward-drafted by jets of heat-singed air
throbbing against cooler currents—the hawks, steady between
the two, their expended energy approaching zero.
North migrates on the pilot’s compass.
The needle wobbles
as if stuck in our veins.
We try to land in Cuba
but find it uninhabited.
The tussocks of palm trees wave us on.
Somewhere along the line, tension fails.
The plane’s nose-fist dips.
The tail twirls.
There won’t be nearly enough bathrooms
onboard for each of us to find seclusion.
Not enough cool mirrors for our burning
foreheads. We will, in due time, agree
to concentrate collectively on the cast
of hawks being delivered across the Americas
on boiler plate thermals. As if it were our own,
we will envision their end, which is precisely like
before their beginning. They encompass something,
the hawks, in following the memory of nice
weather, in their transcontinental deja-vu.
A featureless column of ocean, somewhere, is what
we won’t entertain—nor the invisible saline air,
nor the white surface where we might disappear,
taking with us whatever sound that might entail.