Persistence of 1937

Donald Hall

After fifty years Amelia Earhart's Lockheed fretted with rust still circles over the Pacific. From her skull's scrimshaw
she peers downward, looking for a lane through permanent weather while a sixty-year-old man carves her story onto whalebone
slowly incising the fifth grader who paces from kitchen ' through living room to parlor back to kitchen, eating unbuttered slices of Wonder Bread, listening to the Philco for bulletins
from the Navy: After fifty years her Lockheed still circles.