“A dictionary of shelter”

—John Tranter, “Lufthansa”

Flying over violet-crumble seas, eyes bulging as the rock
rushes by (a sense of stained-glass futures, a fatal diorama
I’m descending through time with an airman’s precision—
the shroud of a cloud’s lop-sided laptop strata slips a little 
as I glimpse the patchwork, or a field, or a metaphor (and
bank (becoming faintly religious—see the world’s correction
while my references slide: taking apart the allusion of mist
with the probability of coffee (or, at least, “creamer”—o-or
you, passively declaring the card does not want to be tapped (smile
as you have been trained, brave crew! Your make-up that is
almost always applied too thickly, in Limerick for example,
a good time always to be had up there (yr unknown hands
of analogue, orange nail-polish, you phrased yr Gaelic lines
to a perfectly polished post-landing denouement, spelling
Humanism, or was it the pilot, nailing his 180 like a motto 
whispered to the Shannon runway? Leaning to the far side

                         (—awww, my nearest exit was behind me!

of the sky, an absentee landlord in hot pursuit. That the sun
has a lens flare, or some deliberate, obscured designer’s flaw
is not worth contemplating at this height. It’s your old flame.
And there to meet you by the car-hire desk, her hair: grey
shakes in your wake (wait—never mind, can you navigate it?
The car-hire parking area’s squashed cigarette-butt promises
speak their way into the vehicle, while you punch its screen
its prior agreements about alcohol-free beers (stumble back
to a crowded cafe, somewhere, perchance to dream a drink
trolley, the zeitgeist clinging to all the beards like raindrops
a smudge of toothpaste in your reflection, in every porthole
blitzes of twisted shandy (wake: order a no-name lemonade
and note that your ancestors grew no taller than this ceiling.
No, there’s mime in the genealogy centre, or was it Katharina
sleeping on the tight ship whose mistress she is, sir? Captain
lifts a hiking trail brieflet from a plastic display case on a wall
explaining Dysert O’Dea Castle & Environs as if ‘t were a lake
as (no time for maudlin, no maiden—you send it elsewhere
under bridges where a river moves fast (& floating in it, stars. 

Note: this poem was first published in Best of Australian Poems 2024, edited by Kate Lilley and Shastra Deo. The first and last words of each line in the poem (apart from the indented line) are taken from John Tranter’s poem ‘Lufthansa’.