Chris Hunt

AIRPORT

Our ends meet at the airport.
Asthma sufferers, agoraphobics,
a hopeless entry of abandoned hosts
through automatic portals and unmanned doors.
What meets ends, except in the essence
behind tearful faces, hard fought or hard felt,
a carrier baggage of casualty’s falls
weighed down with gain, much else undeclared.
The airport is ancient; its runways and ramps
range on out of radar, its taxis and shuttles
a scoping of Brownian motion, atomic
reaction to holdalls whose handling crews hurry
to mirror the chaotic pathways of progress
that cargo-class tickets compel.
                                                   I don’t think
taking care can do harm, on the flat moving walkways
that goad us the way that they want us to go.
I don’t see the electrical network
that powers the signs; I don’t know
how the circling above summons magnetic forces below.

A momentary motion taxis the lanes
between blanched concrete, and neatly disjoints
planes of action, trips an infra-red beam
and the fox diverts Foxtrot Four-Niner from
ground control’s predestined path. A passenger
disembarks late in another dimension,
misses a pre-booked connection, loses
a critical contract and now needs a new occupation.
The fox merely followed free will.

At night only, of course. The naked eye
spies a return match, misses
most of the tendrils meandering no more
at random than DNA’s ripple,
fine silk that flails but ties hard and fast
as if bindweed. The bandwagon pitches –
did I see you there?
                                 That I doubt,
that you do too, that lights our lost hope.

But I know you, touch you in places
too secret for words, a sixth sense
and seventh swarms to our shoulders –
you know what I mean. When at night
the bright dance droops, the air between eyes
crackles with tangible flow, and the two
would-be lovers will be so, but who said
and who knew and who felt the first shocking spark?

The cast will collect. I see them converge
in departures, arrivals and packed baggage claim –
we’re all represented. Our threads interweave,
vibrations at harmonic frequencies higher
than sound play in stasis; a pattern in place.

I’ve been here before. I’ve beaten my way
through my own mental smartcarts that mimic control
and I’m lost. On what level I’m left, what exit
to freeway, what fleeting place this
where I sit and expire. What escape from the siren
who led me with laughter and swift febrile steps
wait a while, don’t I recognize...

And now it flips. Sunspots on eyes and new planets.
The naked heavens afire, no spun veil
to contain comprehension, no network
of signs keeps the language base closed.

Retching on lost atmosphere, but that fear
is just in the mind, and I hack back
to see the big spaces. Here between worlds.
Wail to the cosmos, parched and alone
and alive, hailing the scape and extended,
expectant of silence as wide as the void –
when a voice comes, of ages, of DNA’s
sine wave, that coldly connects in the mind
and then goes.
                         Till I’m lost -
dead in the synapse, dead simultaneous
ache inside bones, in unbuttressed traces
in lymph node and liver, and livid in trains
outside thought. Yet I’m here and you’re not,
boasting duty free purchase but no boarding pass.
I’m here on this level, but still the wave trills
in the veins, a capillary tinnitus
roars in the rain.

You don’t want this.
Out in the surge, you seize all your moments
as I may not mine. Your maelstrom of
watery drops willed together to rush
into waves, your currents are tidal
and ebb in due stage, till your face
betrays creases of softened-up skin, and big beads
down your cheeks from without or within.
Undercurrents can catch you. The picture
will pixellate up on the screen, the splash
as a whole says no more than it means.

Me, I don’t watch. For that matter, that
matters, that inchoate mass will not buoy up
my weight. When I whisper through
routes that aren’t verbal you simply aren’t with me,
it’s not that you’re late.

Black and white is all grey. Stands to reason,
we’re none of us perfect but still the degrees
are the doors to the gates to the path to the plane.
Wishes heavier than air heave to flight,
the less effort the cleaner exhaustion.
I’m out there, and here, and what I am
also, and rows of constructions
are most of it all.
                           The air hums
with the take-off. I won’t see you again.

Chris Hunt read English at Jesus College Cambridge, where he came under the influence of JH Prynne, running the Blue Room and Suspension poetry groups and co-editing Blueprint poetry magazine. In the 70s and 80s his work appeared in numerous magazines and three volumes of his poems were published by small presses. In 1979 he joined BBC Television, moving in 1984 to produce and direct The South Bank Show and in 1988 founding his own
production company, which he ran until 2012. Programmes and films he produced or directed won over 50 awards, including four Emmys and two Baftas. He has recently returned to writing after a gap of many years.