David Kirby

THE 1909 AIR SHOW AT BRESCIA

Together, we imagined the future: D’Annunzio, Puccini,
Kafka, and all of us nobodies, you in your sack coat

and necktie and bowler, I in a skirt and shirtwaist and a hat
with a little brim that shaded my face. The pilots, too,

wore ordinary clothes. The planes were unloaded
and assembled where we could see them, and when they started,

they sounded like cars. When they went up, we saw them
the whole time as well, and when they came down,

they landed on bicycle wheels. But the planes knew more
than we did. We wanted the planes to be ideas,

and they were, noisily considering the skies and then
remaking them according to their desires:

within a year, they flew above a thousand meters
at a speed of a hundred kilometers an hour.

We thought statesmen would fly to one another’s countries
and explain themselves, but instead they built more planes,

added machine guns and bomb racks, turned the air
into battlefields. Still, we wanted to fly, not in some

rattletrap that spattered you with hot oil
but in a shiny tube that sped above the clouds

as attendants brought us cocktails, peanuts, dinner.
That night, we took the train back to Verona.

I heated a risotto, you grilled a horse steak and opened
a bottle of Amarone, and as I brought food to the table,

you took the cushions off the couch and piled them
on our chairs, joking that we were ahead

of the others, that we alone would know
what it’s like to be above the world as we dined.

There’d been a strange innocence to the whole day, I said.
You said the things you love can kill you.

DAVID KIRBY is the author of Little Richard: The Birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll, which the Times Literary Supplement of London called “a hymn of praise to the emancipatory power of nonsense.” His collection The House on Boulevard St.: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. Kirby’s honors include fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. His latest poetry collection is Get Up, Please.