Letter from an airport at midnight

In backward pounces, gone the crowded flight,
the kindly light's led off into the wings
to wait there till it isn't missed. Outside,
deserted cars like jilted lovers sleep.
The night's a drunk that fights revolving glass:
I look away abruptly, stung by thought.

This terminal, in which I fondly thought
to offload all my baggage into flight,
this vast aquarium of vaulted glass,
is everywhere that can be reached with wings
and every night that can't be spanned with sleep
the same tail-lights will wink and wait outside.

And there will always be the same outside:
for absence pins horizons flat, like thought,
and there are always reasons not to sleep.
- A night-time south, the savage evening flight
of paper doves from steeples bloodies wings
against a heaven domed and hard as glass...

Spurning Vallejo for the half-filled glass
before me, I watch wilted girls, outside
non-smoking range, spread shyly under wings
of bright oasis lights, cornered by thought
of stockings, boyfriends, Rosamunde Pilcher, flight
made fun by fragrance flirted in one's sleep;

but you have, like this coffee, murdered sleep,
and their night-music only glints the glass
beneath the skin, these splinters of my flight;
for none but you would ever steal outside
unclimbed perimeters of permitted thought,
to where the body's soul imagines wings.

And as for this letter, there will be no wings
delivering these words to where you sleep.
If I'm to haunt you, let it be a thought
hovering around the reflection in your glass,
as somewhere in the sleepless, warm outside
you hear the skyline speared with roar of flight.


P.S.
Throughout that flight, I felt pursuing wings
that, keeping pace outside, beat through my sleep -
a face in pale glass, gently clouding thought.