01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 4, 2005

-- MITCHELL LesCARBEAU

Sometimes -- rarely -- poems simply appear in our minds nearly complete, without the need to be painstakingly constructed line by line, without poetic embellishment.

It's almost as if they were hovering fully formed in the sky above our heads, simply waiting for us to be receptive, open enough to acknowledge them and draw them in. These poems are truly gifts, and the honest few among poets will admit they had little to do with their genesis, other than being aware and awake and willing to take dictation from thin air.

Mitch LesCarbeau, a prize-winning poet and English professor at Green Mountain College in Vermont, didn't mean to write a poem that day he waited for his wife, Armelle, to arrive at Logan Airport. Armelle is French, and was returning from an extended overseas visit with her family. It was one of the few times Mitch had been to Logan since the horrors of Sept. 11, and that seemed to add to the sense of alertness and anxiety that permeated his thinking.

"I had no intention at the time of gathering material for a poem," he said, "but I suspect the heightened tension of the moment helped imprint the sensations of seeing the things I mention in the poem. I actually had just finished reading a book about the brain that details how this happens. The fact that it was Logan, home of the fated 9/11 flights, added to my anxiety.

"I also refer in the poem to the lack of religious consolation, especially as a contrast to the holy man who kills in the name of his deity. I suppose the most we can hope for in a world drained of epiphanies is to see our loved ones safely land and walk through those big double doors of the International Terminal.

"I also felt compassion, given the general climate of fear, for people I ordinarily wouldn't have noticed -- the business types sweeping into the airport with no one to greet them. There is a sadness about having arrived safely and not being able to share the feeling with loved ones."

Everything in Mitch's poem happened. He was simply fortunate enough to be in the field of receptivity, a place where widely disparate parts come together and almost write themselves.

The poem first appeared in The Literary Review.

At the International Terminal, Logan Airport July 9th, 2003 Communicants from an upper world of death

they have come back to us. They slouch

or they swoop through the double doors

and into our waiting half-circle. A wild and a

molecular love celebrates itself as the flight-jagged

sophomore from her summer in Paris

sideways creeps, arms in flight, into the

howling pack of her family.

A pair of sisters lean behind the tape and intertwine

their arms, they can't wait to touch her.

But let us clear a path in our exuberance

for the ones not waited for, the men

in the calamitous emptiness of their sportscoats, the ones

substituting cell phones for an embrace, the dead-eyed

women in their double-breasted power suits,

for they too have seen the empty face of God

amid the tumult of the cumuli.

And finally there you are among the roses and the mylar balloons

and the invisible kisses loud as giants smooching,

your eyes upturned in hyperbolic exhaustion

and your luggage cart so loaded even the guardsman

with his rifle turns aside and smiles.

This must be the closest to miracle we're granted:

the stabilizer screw not rattled loose,

the theopathic holyman's corked violence kept corked,

and, numinous in the fluorescence,

you. Suddenly girlish, shy, alive. You.