Patricia Hooper won the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize for her piece, “The View from There,” in 2011. Her poem appeared in the Fall 2011 edition of the Michigan Quarterly Review and can be found in our archives.
High over Italy
this morning, the sky is filled
with parachutes it seems, but when
they come a little closer—fifty
or sixty of them—every dazzling
undiluted color, sporting stripes,
we see that they’ve become
hot air balloons, and dangling
in their baskets, passengers
are waving, heading for
the Alps.
They skim
the trees along
the road we’re cycling down,
and rise on billowing gusts across
the countryside, then up and
up they go, until it’s hard to guess
their altitudes. How leisurely
they seem, drifting above
the hillside towns to reach
those jagged apparitions
tipped with snow.
I’d want to go
too, if I hadn’t seen
that interview on last night’s
local news: how a reporter riding
along a year ago to write the story
of the festival saw the balloon ahead
lift suddenly and not quite clear
the peaks, then start to sink
toward somewhere just below
the cliffs, and later read
that all aboard
were dead
although from where
he floated, farther still
across the firmament, it looked
like one more graceful if abrupt
descent, and when he leaned to peer
over the rim, he saw what seemed to be
a heap of multicolored nylon sails
collapsing, or a shining silken tent
pitched on the rocks. Given
that god’s-eye-view too far
from earth to hear
the oddly silent
fall, or to observe (before it all
went up in flames) a single fractured
skull, he would have called it beautiful.
