As I was sewing this evening very hastily and badly the green velvet skirt — which turned out a kind of half-failure because the material was too hard to handle — too much damn slippage — like poetry — I was musing on my general disenchantment with poetry and wondering — well, I guess I was thinking vaguely about the story of the of the, was it Cypriot? and German? pilots who recently crashed a plane possibly because they couldn’t communicate with each other in English — and earlier I had been thinking that I could use that in my classes as a kind of Victorian morality scare-tale — and the fact that “English is the lingua franca of air traffic control” was going through my head — well anyway, I was also thinking about that old Blake quote, “How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?” and how impressionable I was, ready to see every bird as an immense world of delight — and how I’m too stressed out in my adulthood to fall so readily into such moments of satori — but I was wondering… are there any really erudite, well-educated pilots who, when they are about to take off, turn to each other and say, “Well? Ready to cut the airy way?” and then start the engines…