Nate Maxson’s most recent poem to appear here was “Witching Hour” (November 2017)

Winterflight
By Nate Maxson

I might, in my more egotistical phases, be referred to as The Minister of Shadows but let’s not get ahead of ourselves

                        You are traveling through the desert on a bus with no passengers

Because I’m trying (I’ve been trying) to clarify my theory about the eternal war for our enslavement between our ideologies and our creations, clever stuff I know but I’m trying to make it palatable for the buyer’s marker

                        There is no driver and the grassland spreads out like a caul

Still, I go quiet as my bruises ripple outwards like still water disturbed, a single rock hitting a windshield at 70 miles an hour in the winter on the highway

                        You wrap yourself in your coat and huddle down in your seat, cell phone signal the first to go and your lover silent on the other end

How we interpose machinery into these things: the assumption that when I pull the cord on the engine, my deathbed will rise like a flying carpet into the brightly gaping ozone hole

                        You are dreaming an endpoint, either side of light

On the day that you die you will be visited by three wise mice or was it the day you’re born?

I forget the details of the fable I know I was sent to tell, it was so long ago and I’ve told it so many times that the tapestry resembles a spiderweb pattern, singing strings in the wind

                        It only gets faster from here but the cold will keep you awake

But what I do remember, down there close enough to earth to taste the frost and watch the thistles tremble and buck for light, ah what I remember

Only you

When I let go of gravity, which we must never forget is a weak force in the big blueprints of all things that I assume exist: when I let go (these are the rules), because there’s nakedness and then there’s this: no one else is allowed to see me when my feet leave the ground