The flight is smooth, though taking that wide loop
over Santa Cruz, the 747
quivers in the heat shimmer,
a hound's nose over a scent.
Then coming out of its tilt it climbs
and plunges ahead in euphoria.

Wheeling over bent latitudes
we watch on the skyline's curved reflector
an endless phrase of light.
The dawn-fires never seem to end
as they blaze behind the Karakoram
and are lit up afresh over the Hindu Kush
Over Alburz, at last, the sun comes out,
the well-fleshed face of a Persian girl
emerging from diaphanous veils.

The solitudes are beneath us now,
of ice, of desert, of corrugated cloud.
The plane is in a trance,
not moving in an unmoving sky.
Its roar has pierced the eardrums and disappeared,
a soundscape cruising to silence.
So eerily still, you think that space
is coiling, tensed, for a counter-thrust.
Not a ripple anywhere, you drift
with the spindrift of the earth.

The pilot interrupts; his voice comes
smooth as moselle over the public address.
'That smoke you see to the far right
touching the sky's belly
is the bombed refinery at Abadan
flaming to glory.'
Another voice comes through, mechanized as morse,
'We are eighty miles from Abadan and on course.'

At the day's end I land, to find
morning has rearranged itself here.

I present them:
my brown-loaf face
fresh from an Indian oven,
my cindery hair,
my passport signed with pimples.

My friend is there with an anorak
lined with fur. 'Not animal?' I ask, horrified.
He assures me, 'It'sj ust acrylic, fake.
Don't get worked up man, start learning to forget;
and drop your taboos, for chrissake!'

A plane hovers overhead, impatient,
circling Heathrow in a rumbling gyre.
We filter in. London, here I come
to your nylon furs and electric fires.