Black Box

Because the cockpit, like the snowy village in a paperweight,
parodies the undomed world outside, and because
even a randomly composed society like Air Florida

flight #7 needs minutes for its meeting, the tape
in the black box slithers and loops with its slow,
urinary hiss like the air-filtering system in a fall-

out shelter. What’s normally on the tape? Office life
at 39,000 feet, radio sputter and blab, language
on automatic pilot. Suppose the flight should fail.

Cosseted against impact and armored against fire,
the black box records not time but history. Bad choice.
The most frequent last word on the black box

tape is “Mother.” Will this change if we get
more female pilots? Who knows? But here’s
the best exchange: “We’re going down.” “I know.”

:: William Matthews, Forseeable Futures (1987)

Mail Order Catalogs

Pewter loons, ceramic bunnies, and faux bamboo
are for the suburbs, and bird feeders in Tudor
and saltbox models, and tulips to force in delft.

But in smoky bars in small towns late on week nights,
where the old songs on the jukebox call in
their emotional debts only from habit,

for everyone’s derisively broke, and father out
in the washes and hollows from which men
drive vehicles to town to apply for loans for vehicles,

and from which women must buy a good dress by mail—
loneliness is the product and the customer gets sold to it:
country music, booze, and sunset shot through the cheesecloth

of topsoil powdered as fine in the dusky air as make-up
rich women wear back east. Once this darkening sky
was ocean thousands of feet up, and we were floor.

:: William Matthews, Forseeable Futures (1987)

City Planning

To be above the slough and sewage and mud,
the horseshit, the clang and sparks of horse-
shoes, the blue pennants of car exhaust,

the genial and obscene ruckus of contending
cabbies, the waft of rat- and dog-
luring garbage, the antiphonal tide

of crime and police—who wouldn’t desire it?
Not from small space only does a city
grow upward, but also for quiet sleep

and the light for which buildings vie like a gang
of gawky plants. Cars plead their loud torts
in the streets. Rats shinny up the dumbwaiter

ropes like expectations of the middle class.
Never mind, we’ll invent the elevator, broaden
the tax base, and build up. Away we go.

:: William Matthews, Forseeable Futures (1987)