Flying

In olden days when witches flew, they say,
two theories explain what people saw:
either people imagined everything,
or someone actually saw women
somehow high in the sky without any
hallucinations or any madness,
and the simpler of two explanations
is supposed to be the better  of them.
Is it simpler to believe people saw
what they say, or to believe that all must
be liars, or crazy, or subject to
mass hysteria, dreams, visions, devils?

When I was a child, flying on airplanes
cross-country between one parent and the
other, I would peer out the window to see
the fairy-land of clouds above the small
world of humans, doll-like, tiny, and laid
out like a patchwork of ego and shape;
when my sight was obscured by clouds, my eyes
focused on the clouds themselves, all fractal
like the rivers and coastlines and postage
stamp farms, like the ant-sized roadways branching
arterial, until the clouds closed in.
In the grey blankness of clouds, I learned how
to see the floaters in my eyes and past,
to swirling fields of probabilities,
electrons or pixies darting quickly.
Clouds are cold and wet; just walk through a fog;
were you to sport among them, the image
of fairy-land would melt - but from the seat
of even the smallest plane, you may dream
of flying among sunset ice cream clouds.

Rendered baby fat recipes were an
invention of the Inquisition; so,
what oils and herbs, what minerals, you ken,
permitted flight must have gone up in flames.
When pigs fly we will know that they have found
a stand of the right plants and such, and need
only to look for where mother sows are
guarding their fledgling piglets near the copse.
Until then we must suffice ourselves to
fly in machines, or fake it by falling
in special suits, or trick our senses with
virtual reality, or not fly.