Dave Bonta's "Dreamliner" begins with a pun, and the pun sets up the whole poem. "Aircraft," the speaker says, "sounds like something one could learn: how to breathe, how to oxidize." The word is split into *air* and *craft*, a skill as well as a machine. The poem then asks what it means to practise that skill from a passenger seat, carried across an ocean while doing nothing at all.
The form is a mix of prose paragraphs and short three-line verses, in the manner of a travel journal with haiku set into it. The prose is relaxed and conversational, full of long sentences, asides ("well, every map of Iceland ever") and small jokes. The short verses, unrhymed and broken mid-phrase ("a movie plays on the back / of every seat"), work like camera clicks. Each freezes one image from the longer account. Because there is no rhyme or regular metre, the rhythm comes from this alternation of the unhurried and the sudden. The prose drifts like the passengers half-asleep in the cabin's "lovely hush of white noise," and the verses jolt them awake.
Distance and time are measured in odd, human ways. The plane needs "the full width of Norway at its widest point" just to climb to cruising altitude. Later the crossing from Norway to Iceland takes "a little over an hour," where it took the Norsemen "more than a week." The comparison is playful, since their ships become "part Dreamliner, part F-22". But the repeated word "craft" quietly links old seafaring with modern flight. Even the porthole windows, through which passengers "gape," borrow from ships.
The poem's strongest imagery is of light. The long sunset leads the plane "like Yahweh leading the Jews out of Egypt," a grand biblical comparison for a band of red above a low horizon. The speaker's body insists it "should be night," so the poem feels half dream, which suits the plane's name. Then the volcano arrives, a "stream of bright orange" and "a glowing wound / in the darkness." When the caldera flares, it is "as livid as a setting sun." The earth briefly takes over the sun's job, and the real fire below replaces the fading one ahead. There is a nice irony in the earlier detail that the speaker first sees the volcano on Google Earth, on the seat-back screen, where it appears as "a great round hole." The screen shows the earth first, then the window shows it truly. Even the wonder is mediated by technology until the moment the passengers look out.
That moment is one of the poem's warmest. "Volcano! in half / a dozen languages / we gape through our portholes." For a few seconds strangers share one reaction, and the exclamation mark gives the line a childlike excitement the calm prose has held back. The speaker is also reading the landscape through books. Vatnsfjord is recognised "from the maps that accompanied translations" of sagas, and the speaker thinks of "the ill-fated hero Gisli" when the Westfjords appear. Iceland arrives as a place already half-imagined, and the North Atlantic's "waves and storms" feel "as remote as a legend" from inside the "comfortable, high-tech bubble." That phrase carries the poem's central tension. Modern travel makes the world easy to cross, but the ease risks making it unreal.
The last haiku leaves this unresolved. "Curve of the horizon / even from this height / it's hard to believe." The unfinished thought can be read two ways. It may be hard to believe the earth is curved even when we are high enough to see it, or hard to believe we are really here. The poem does not choose, and the missing object of "believe" is the point. Earlier, the speaker smiles at a remark that the pilots might otherwise "fly up over the top of Canada," a reminder that the route is a curve on a sphere, not a straight line on a flat map.
The poem is significant because it takes an experience most readers find dull, a long-haul flight, and shows how much wonder it hides. It does this without lecturing, through pun, unexpected comparison and a small shared gasp at a glowing wound in the dark.