A Poem by Robin Beth Schaer

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Middle Flight

The baby’s feet never touch the ground.
Before now, he floated in dark water
so I hold him like an exile for months

until his own weight is no longer foreign.
Someday he too will chase his lost lightness
half-remembered toward the sky. History

is full of flightless falls: metal wings
and bird machines built without destination,
just to be loose of the anchor. No one

flew until a papermaker watched
his wife’s chemise swell beside a fire
and conjured a craft to ride the heat.

Like putting a cloud in a paper bag, he filled
the first balloon with air from burning straw
and wet wool, and launched a rooster

above Versailles. The night my son takes
his first steps, I let paper lanterns go
in the dark and watch them soar from sight.

They rise moonward, like the aeronaut
who vanished over Lake Michigan
in a muslin balloon. The sky utters reasons,

lies told to other lives. Maybe the lanterns
sink in the distance, maybe the man drowned.
Neither return home. In Brazil, a priest

hitched himself to a thousand balloons
and was gone. He must have whispered céu
as he climbed aloft (only in English are heaven

and sky different words). As a child, I tied
balloons to my arms and tried to rise off
the grass. I wished for distance to turn the town

miniature, into a train set with matchstick
trees and voices too far to hear. I believed
the sky was actual blue, not the elastic

scatter of light that only makes it seem so.
I still cannot hold this truth in my mind:
navy, midnight, and royal are just semblance

of elsewhere. How bitter to sacrifice wonder
for proof. Napoleon kept a balloonist
in court who was more at home above

than below. She was ugly on the ground,
startled by dogs and carriages, but daring in air,
an acrobat with fire and ostrich feathers,

until she fell from a blazing balloon, dying
that seemed like flying. Maybe there is no refuge
in suspension, no swerve from gravity

and broken cobblestone. But to hide in faith
is easier than to contend with doubt.
What moved through sky I once believed

was holy. I buried moths and blue jays, and kept
a shoebox reliquary of feathers, rockets,
and airplane spoons. Somewhere in childhood

an equation is fused between elevation
and milk. It begins this way: too tired to stand,
we reach toward arms and find altitude.

Later, we scramble up trees, climb mountains,
and sail toward the poles to be light again
with the world underneath. In California,

a truck driver strapped weather balloons
on his lawn chair to hover above his wife
and house with a sandwich and cooler of beer,

but barreled three miles up, into the path
of landing planes. A secretary in North Carolina
carried her seat to a field, floated all morning

under a cluster of balloons, then rolled it back
to her desk and finished typing a letter. Sometimes
the world is too heavy, or we are too heavy in it.

At seven, I stood under an empty sky
hoping to be taken up by a beam of light,
a tornado, or the claws of a winged beast.

I traced satellites across the dark, awake
all night in the backyard. Their orbits grew smaller
and closer with every rotation. I waited all summer

for the space station to come down and was afraid
of what else might fall. In school, the siren rang
and grammar stopped. Behind the cubbies, I knelt

before mittens, hats, and paper bags.
I pictured bombs dropping, a cloud mushrooming
over the soccer field. The sky was strategy

for war. Decades before, beneath a silver balloon
at dawn, an Air Force colonel floated up
nineteen miles. More alone and farther than

anyone had been, he was high enough to see
the planet curve away. He radioed a message
then parachuted down: The sky above is void,

very black and very hostile. He was not
the first in the stratosphere, nor was an ape
or airship either. Before him, a shell lobbed

at France vaulted the height then crashed
through a cathedral roof, killing worshippers
knelt in prayer. The fallout shelters are gone now.

In my son’s school, they practice clearing halls
and locking doors. They hide silent on the floor.

I no longer worry about missiles but who

has a gun instead. I thought courage was leaping
from the basket. I thought the risk was descent,
not departure. When my son loses his grip,

a yellow balloon escapes and I remember
that skyward longing, to be untethered
from my life. After drifting over Paris,

the first balloonist declared, I felt we were
flying away from the earth and all its troubles.
Then he left his copilot behind and rose alone

ten thousand feet. He heard his breath
and rippling silk, and watched the sun set
a second time that day. Never has a man

felt so solitary, so terrified, he said
and refused to fly again. When my son says,
Lift me up, I raise him over my head,

not to catch the balloon or be airborne,
but to look down on me here. Above is empty,
but earth is home, even the bombs know that.

Robin Beth Schaer is the author of Shipbreaking (Anhinga, 2015). She worked as a deckhand aboard the Tall Ship Bounty, a hundred-and-eighty-foot full-rigged ship lost in Hurricane Sandy.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at poems@theawl.com.