The Pilot in the Jungle

Machine stitched rivets ravel on a tree

Whose name he does not know. Left in the sky,

He dangles from a silken cumulus

(Stork’s bundle upside down

On the delivering wind) and sees unborn

Incredible jungles of the lizard’s eye:

Dark fern, dark river, a shale coliseum

Mountained above one smudgepot in the trees

That was his surreal rug on metered skies

And slid afire into this fourth dimension

Whose infinite point of meeting parallels

He marks in ultra-space, suspended from

The chords of fifty centuries

Descending to their past—a ripping sound

That snags him limb by limb. He tears and falls

Louder than any fruit dropped from the trees,

And finds himself in mud on hands and knees.

The opened buckle frees him from his times.

He walks three paces dressed in dripping fleece

And tears it off. The great bird of his chute

Flaps in the trees: he salvages its hide

And starts a civilization. He has a blade,

Seventeen matches, his sheepskin, and his wits.

Spaceman Crusoe at the wreck of time,

He ponders unseen footprints of his fear.

No-eyes watch his nothing deep in nowhere.

III

He finds the wreck (the embers of himself)

Salvages bits of metal, bakelite, glass—

Dials twisted from himself, his poverty.

Three hours from time still ticking on his wrist

The spinning bobbins of the time machine

Jam on an afternoon of Genesis

And flights of birds blow by like calendars

From void to void. Did worlds die or did he?

He studies twisted props of disbelief

Wondering what ruin to touch. He counts his change

(“Steady now, steady ...”) flips heads or tails and sees

The coin fall into roots. An omen? (“Steady ...”)

He laughs (a nerve’s slow tangling like a vine)

Speaks to himself, shouts, listens, hears a surf

Of echo rolling back to strand him there

In tide pools of dead time by caves of fear,

And enters to himself, denned in his loss,

Tick-tick, a bloodbeat building on his wrist,

Ratcheting down the dead teeth of a skull

(The fossil of himself) sucked out of sight

Past heads and tails, past vertebrae and gill

To bedrocks out of time, with time to kill.

Copyright Credit: John Ciardi, “The Pilot in the Jungle” from Live Another Day (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1949). Used with the permission of the Ciardi Family Publishing Trust.

Source: The Collected Poems of John Ciardi (University of Arkansas Press, 1997)