The speaker of "Frequent Flyer" starts out as a passenger and stops being one. By the end of the poem the aircraft is a body, the body is an animal, and the animal has an ancestor who calls back from deep time. The central idea is that flight, which looks like a triumph of machinery over nature, is really nature's own appetite carried into the sky.
The opening stanza builds this merger with a stumble. "I was flying in an aircraft of bones" is followed by a quick denial: "not the pilot not the ball-turret gunner." With no punctuation, the list of roles the speaker refuses rushes past. The ball-turret gunner is the man sealed in a glass bubble under a wartime bomber, and readers may hear an echo of Randall Jarrell's poem about him. Either way, the speaker rejects both the commander and the vulnerable human cargo. Then comes a self-correction: "as if / in my own bones / my aluminium hide." The "as if" tries to keep the comparison polite, but the line breaks let it collapse into fact. Bones and aluminium become interchangeable, and "hide" suggests the skin of an animal rather than the shell of a machine.
The second stanza turns the dull routines of air travel into sensation. The captain's voice "goes all through me." The flight attendant's boredom "buzzes against my rivets / like a trapped wasp." It is a funny image, and an accurate one, since a recited safety demonstration really does carry that low, irritated hum. It also does something quieter. Rivets become nerve endings, and the insect simile plants a creature in the cabin before the final stanza brings in another small, hungry animal.
Stanza three is where the poem changes gear, and the verbs change with it. The earlier "was flying" gives way to the present tense: "I rise hungry to exceed myself / I dip a wing and turn." Note the word "hungry." The plane is driven by appetite, not fuel, and "exceed myself" gives the climb an almost spiritual ambition. Below, the suburbs appear as "lit grids" with "their unlikely multitude / of shadows which must be trees." That "must be" is the voice of someone reasoning from a great height, deducing the natural world rather than seeing it. Trees have become something to infer, which makes the arrival of the last stanza more surprising.
There the speaker imagines "my very ancient-most ancestor / a tree rat all insectivorous sinew." The clumsy, comic superlative "ancient-most" reaches for a deeper past than "oldest" would. The poem suggests an early small mammal, lean and built for catching insects. That connects it back to the wasp, and it makes the speaker's hunger inherited rather than modern. Then the creature "answers my roar with its own," so the jet engine is met by a small animal on equal terms. The final lines, "a long high note straight out / of Cassiopeia," stretch the sound across the sky. The break after "straight out" delays the constellation's name, and the five-syllable word hangs at the end like the note itself. The ancestor is on the ground, yet its cry seems to come from the stars, as if the poem were folding evolutionary time and astronomical distance into one sound.
Formally the poem is free verse. It has no rhyme and no regular metre, and the stanzas vary in length, ending on the longest. The syntax feels spoken and slightly breathless, and the missing punctuation in the first stanza gives way to a steadier rhythm as the plane climbs. Sound does some of the work: the plosives of "bones," "ball-turret" and "buzzes" are tight and mechanical, while "long high note" opens into long vowels.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it takes one of the most numbing modern experiences, sitting in a pressurised tube being told where the exits are, and makes it strange and a little majestic without losing the humour. The title is a loyalty-scheme phrase, and the poem quietly reclaims it. The real frequent flyers are a whole lineage of creatures, and the passenger is only the latest of them.