I was the only child on that plane, apart from the children:
the jets powered up and I braced myself for the climb
as passengers up in business class were getting to grips
with the price of zinc in Die Welt or Frankfurter Allgemeine,
but I just studied the nicks on the flexible armoured wing—
what were they for? Well, I wasn't exactly sure, but felt
reassured by the captain's polite Etonian intonation
("safe pair of hands") and the phrase "precision engineering".
Inwardly I whooped at the excellent sights below me—
whole rows of town roofs wound like African braids,
then fawn and ochre farms laid out as abstract art,
and on the coast, sports complexes curled like hearing aids,
as even nature began to put on a pretty good show,
eg with her fascinating light/dark 4:30 tremulations
as we swooped up over the greeny undulous sea.
Under us—mermaids, dolphins. (A dream? I don't know.)
Great clouds over Vienna, the misty tarmac: one thinks
of sinister gasses, the flight control an aussichtsturm,
or Freud with his dreambook doing a runner; one sees
the plague cathedrals, blue plumes on state bureaucracies
(Marxist senses tingling under the superstructural weight);
one uses the word "one" for the first time ever
and one's sentences move firmly to their inexorable conclusion,
apparently civilised and sedate.
And there in the charming half-light beerkeller,
you drink ein schwarzer Kaffe and, spying the LUKoil
office, the Soviet monument, your mind stares back and east—
gangsters in both directions hurtling over the good black soil,
forests and barns on fire in your eyes amid the harmless (?) talk:
"So, what do you think of this Haider thing?" (you overhear)—
consider then "the racial question", and stroke your beard,
noticing now on the menu a disturbing fixation with pork.
(Vienna, April 2000)
