The shadow of the jet in whose belly I nestled
grew larger over your town, its darkness drifting over
the house where you lived then with your wife,
until with an irk it touched down in the dry valley
of your runway. All that week you and I went to and fro,
hither and yon, ants on the map, never touching noses,
before I took flight again eight days later, not knowing yet
you existed. Now I lie in bed under your warm shadow,
in the shade of your face above me. In the evenings
we run, noting the faint drone of a descending plane
above us. Sometimes I look up, the way I did before,
no longer envying the folk blithely toasting cheap brut
in coach. Too, I don’t look down from my round window
in the air and yearn to be that tiny car on a back road,
brim full of laughing family. I am here. All that brought
us together is a slim chance in a thousand: a photo
I’d snapped that you saw out there in the wide ether
of an impulse-bought t-shirt which read, “In Kentucky,
there are more barrels of bourbon than there are people.”