Upstairs

MY SON who lives on thin air and high speed
Speaks poems that have shaped the shapeless air;
He takes up houses men cannot outgrow;
When he climbs clouds, he does it, by a stair.
“I was upstairs that day,” he says, that day
He went between high heads of summer rain
And under meadows of lightning where the mists
Were turning into rice of icy grain.

My son returns from another universe
Where death is always watching like a hawk,
Yet speaks no hawk’s high language, but a man’s,
And old Greek gods are smiling in his talk.
The azure halls of winds are full of men;
Though wings may grow on each side of their head,
Their thighs are like the solid curves of hills,
Their lovely feet fit lovely earth they tread.

These new air-men go as children go
Calmly up old stairs to quiet and sleep,
As men go up to beds of love or death
On earth, foot after foot. They do not leap.
They go where all is windows, and a thing
That has no eyes through every window stares,
But they build out below them as they fly
The old strengths of men’s childhood and safe stairs.