Osage County Museum, Pawhuska, Oklahoma

It's mostly the same here
slow as melonvines in an arctic sun
where the great ball of the plane
went down in nineteen thirty-five & an eskimo
with a camera took a picture that stayed
in his camera twenty-one years
& by some chance he told
an explorer who bought the film
& found the crash
& the bodies under tarp looking like
two seals on the ice,
the crumpled plane with oversized pontoons,
the propeller as though
it could turn again—
the men, Wiley Post & Will Rogers,
still twelve miles southwest of Barrow, Alaska.

— Diane Glancy

"Osage County Museum, Pawhuska, Oklahoma," is from One Age in a Dream by Diane Glancy (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1986) Copyright © Diane Glancy. Reprinted with permission from the author.

Home page image: "Wegbereiter Ikarus," print, woodblock on paper, by Wilhelm Geissler, 1966. (Courtesy NASM)