Your jet contrails stream
across my face of sky
like a money shot
in slow motion.
Only, I receive no money,
just the muffled sound
of jet fuel transforming
your tiny plane into frosting.
O great blue cake,
inspire the bodies to land
across your surface
and I will swim into you
and pull out survivors.
At night, my light
flashes up at fly-overs
my emergency(s).
I know Morse code
for S and O
but have forgotten
which is S and which is O
so I just signal
so… so… so… so… so…
which is why no one comes
to rescue me, just passes by,
expecting me to find something.
To come back from the cavern
of my memory holding it,
giving it to you.
###
Matt Rasmussen is the author of Black Aperture which won the 2013 Walt Whitman Award. It was also a finalist for the 2014 National Book Award and was awarded the 2014 Minnesota Book Award for Poetry. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Water~Stone Review, Paper Darts, Poets.org and elsewhere. He is a founder and editor of the independent poetry press Birds, LLC. and lives in Robbinsdale, Minnesota.
“FLY OVER POEM W/ BILLY COLLINS ENDING” originally appeared in Paper Darts in 2011.