When the cameras wanted her to kiss her husband goodbye
she shook his hand. Newsreel never showed the crimson

in her cheek, the gap between her teeth — he told her: Smile
— mouth closed, dear. And don't wear hats! Let them see

your tousled locks. So it came to this — nothing to do but tie
a smoky rope around the world. This is the last flight,

the camera clicking questions, You can never miss
an island, she smiles, tooth-gap, open mouth. This

was her domesticity — a zigzag stitch connecting
the hemispheres, above the abyss of Africa, from one

ocean's absence to another. In the cockpit, water bottles,
tomato juice, airsick pills, sandwiches she couldn't eat.

From L.A., her stomach six days in a knot. On the line
from Honolulu to her husband — I'm experiencing

"personnel difficulties" — her radio expert gone, yes
but this was different, this was code

for the navigator's whisky jag. Quit now, come home
Amelia — the line breaking up — I'm finding it

hard to hear you, he says, I'm losing you —
And still to come, the hardest stitch — across

the Pacific's sheen to Howland Island — the needle could lose
north, cloud's blue fabric slip apart. But this is home —

the Lockheed's berth emptied for gas tanks, emptiness
meant for parachute and life raft she'd left behind.

Her bony wrist bare, the bracelet forgotten, elephant hair
for luck. Still, her faith immense as the godless sky —

Howland, strip of sand less than two miles wide, thin
mouth on the sea's vast face, wouldn't it open for her,

mouth how? Clear morning, her eyes burn the horizon
with looking, the sun's thin resting place. Everyone gone,

it seemed, from the world — no husband, no agent, no line
of cars crawling under ticker-tape snow, no heady scent

of roses, intoxication of fame. Just Earth's endless, indifferent
curve. And this place, this plane: floating, rising, seeming

to fall, then finding solid air. Gasoline evaporating
like a spirit somewhere deep in the motor's hum, scent

of whisky from the navigator's mouth, the hush
as he breathes cigarette after cigarette into ash.

You can never miss an island. Her voice breathless
into the speaker — I'm flying the line, can no longer

hear you. Repeat. Cannot hear... her voice falling
away like a chute over the sea — slow, circling down—

Then, a moment of pure seduction in the drone of fear —
engines quiet now — points the nose and wings straight

into the darkest cloud bank, hears nothing of the radio's
crackling code, needle not stitching but spinning —

and emerges sunblind and exhausted, into neither
heaven nor hell, but slips between, into the needle eye,

the island herself, into the last silver glint of possibility.