In the introduction to her collection of short essays on Australian poets, “Fishing for Lightning: The Spark of Poetry”, Sarah Holland-Blatt writes “As a form, poetry is full of freedom and possibility. It asks the reader to be open to coincidence and association, to music and imagery, to chance and change. Poems are full of surprises: each line is a little detonation of language and imagery, each stanza a series of swift steps into the unknown.” Holland-Blatt’s “Night Flight” is a perfect demonstration of these detonations of language and imagery. From one line to the next throughout the poem, we are shepherded across continents and desires, to destinations known and unknown, physical, temporal, bodily, imaginative and personal, where everything is “defined / by distance: how close we were, how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh / and those killing Chicago winds”.
Sarah Holland-Blatt is one of Australia’s leading poets, editors and literary critics. She has been published widely internationally, including in The New Yorker on several occasions. From 2014 to 2019 she was the poetry editor of Island magazine, and was also the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2016 and The Best Australian Poems 2017. Her three collections of poems to date have swept up nearly every major literary award Australian poetry has to offer, with her most recent title, Jaguar, winning the 2023 Stella Award.
Night Flight
As my plane drops down in turbulence
I think of you and of Salt Lake City,
I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes
and of Omaha and of adamant plains.
I think of all the places
I have never been: Caracas,
La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way
our bodies puzzled together in that room
over pine woods where night deer
passed in the snow, their lonesome
inscrutable tracks sluicing
in the morning’s melt, I think of
your eyes that are almost the colour
of mercury, of their unbearable weight,
I think of the plateau of your chest
rising, rising, and of your hand
resting on my right thigh,
of the slim glint of your wedding
band in the dove predawn light.
I think of how everything is defined
by distance: how close we were,
how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh
and those killing Chicago winds
and union towns near Detroit, Michigan
where loyalty is the only religion.
I think of the sound of your breathing,
which is the sound of fields
of blond Illinois wheat bent down,
I think of those silver silos
of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville,
barns blazing in all that silence
as we drove through what we could
not think or say. There is no grace
in this kind of longing, there is only pain,
pain which I have always preferred
anyway – it is where I live,
and called love by any other name.