from Blackwater Quartet, selection 13 (Theme)

It occurred to me recently that in the course of several years I've written poems on the theme of flight, and, more dramatically, war in the air.

The following poems, from different books in the Blackwater Quartet series, examine the air war in the Great War and World War Two, with the final piece in this selection a reverie on the nature of manned flight itself, focusing on the Wright Brothers.



In Flanders
 
Late-century childhood
among water-colour gardens,
and accordion creases in the aprons of the maids,
lulled them dreamily to toys and comfort stories, wrens
nesting at the window,
painted lead cavalry in grand brigades.
The empire of the seaside ebbed, rain they shook
from picnic linen
now shaking them awake, airborne,
strafing infantry near Menin.
 
Death flies faster, quells
dogfight stunts, half-loops of Camels or a Spad’s chandelles.
A circus Fokker swings westerly, plummets through cumulus.
The drifting Sopwith rolls into the sights
and then away in oily smoky spirals.
The pilot burns,
tumbling deadstick through iron weather.
 
Who owns the Somme, underwrites a time whose ghost persists?
 
From the travel books of childhood,
cut-throat stories constellate.
In academy exhibits, a storm of faces
stirs beyond the State,
an inkwash of weather for the world beneath,
for cold suns the nights extinguish.


A Visitor at Madingley

You paved the shires for runways,
for Fortresses from a fortress island, rising
over corrugated fields
in apparition flights, charting Europe.
The turrets swing to track the stitch of cannon blaze,
Reich fighters falling from the sun.
 
Behind the blister dome,
your own face, and the faces of the others
you remember
where the flak has found them:
you cannot place the names of these dead. They hover
in icy miles and burning air, half a century
since their lives had crystallised.
 
Again the old dream, where the silk above you blooms
and sobbing blackout pardons your survival.
 
Tracers mark
the clockwork arc
the machine assumes without you, and you
awake where bombers stall in hammering fire, and crews
disintegrate where the landscape yaws.
 
Bleak expanse of barracks,
after weekend leave to nowhere,
after the drills and practice sorties,
why did you live?
 
Rising to the mission lost, the lives you never save
demand your witness and release.
 
The Eighth passes over.
The innocent and the guilty in their separate worlds,
presences as real as the world
your grief has made, remain in photographs
unchanged.

These graves outnumber dreams,
a peace made perfect in these sudden lanes of stone.
 
Each night, cities perish in a breath.
Each night, the firestorms cleanse.
Falling, you rise again, trading life for life,
your own for these companion dead.


Wing Geometry
(Hawker Hurricane Restoration Detail, Scheme B Camouflage)
 
Across the pane, an X of tape,
the cross repeated on each window
here in Operations—
we call it luck the bombers overshot.
 
Beyond the field, the thump 250s make
confirms ‘…not us’.
From the bell we meet the sun in minutes,
climbing through stink and brightness.
 
We kill, are met and killed, in cold
over picture-puzzle landscapes.
When wreckage
the colour of Kent marshes is recovered, you will find
I am twenty this autumn.
 
Earth and sky are muted, riveted contours
painted hawthorn and damp clay, sheared
where the Messerschmitt rolled
just faster.


Kitty Hawk
 
1. Puzzle in Bird-Soaring
Success four flights Thursday morning…
                                —Wright telegram
 
Along the roll axis, muslin,
wood, and gasoline combine in
fits of lift and pillow sand, wingwarped
twists of distance, that record
December paths this morning toward
a chain-and-sprocket reckoning.
 
The altitude is coaxed. Props, lent
horsepower’s coefficient
measured against the drag, consign
the glider tests to data, years
of improvised mechanics, gears
to prove a levelling design.
 
The ropes disturb the vertical,
the puppet winch resists the fall—
rudder, aileron, lock the flight
with pulleys. The cradled pilot
shifts, seconds knotted to the shot
that gathers in his line of sight.
 
From Nags Head on the Outer Banks,
the ocean’s easterlies fold hanks
of shore grass leeward. A relief
of machine shadow clears the hill,
across the dunes at Kill Devil
the trailing edge of disbelief.
 
The airfoils rotate. In distance
and duration, the resistance
of pressures builds and fades, the shove
of engineers to keener space
along Atlantic breakers— race
footprints they find themselves above.


2. How Things Work
Nay, you shall pardon me; none shall know my tricks.
                                    —Marlowe, Edward II, V.iiii
 
Here is the concept: new shadows above you.
We have made it so.
 
As a bird remains suspended in a calm,
the patent is clear, both suspect and curative,
using volatiles to prevent composite voids,
matrix characteristics to understand fabrications,
resin infusion, filament winding,
as a bird remains suspended in a calm,
will even soar.
 
Not devices, but the pilot balancing,
racking rudders
into airflow, strutted against the fall,
this invention, this piece of God’s mind
821393 called Flyer
others mimic, stealing mechanism thoughts
movable against tailspin, until courts prove
submission of these secrets,
in this envelope of tasks the 12-horsepower dream
of raindrops, their weight upon the wings.

 
3. Salvage and Statuary
The airplane stays up because it doesn’t have time to fall.
                                              — Orville Wright
 
The album images, archival glass plates,
reveal the way a photograph was taken—
exposure times listed, stop settings,
since September 1900 the shore
a suitable location of constant wind and privacy.
 
From a Carolina shack, from a tent on the sands,
from scratch, a likely model of intention—
pitch, roll, and yaw, from these cable-strung axes
a flying season—
three years later, that winter morning
after the last flight, a rogue gust catches the machine, turns it
over and over, over and over
toward the sea.
 
JT Daniels, from the Life-Saving Station nearby,
grabs on, falls rolling in the breaking frame,
tumbles out in wreckage: I was plumb scared.
 
‘Well, it’s done now.’
 
In the photograph, a moment rescued from the wind
rises through bronze pavilions—
today as always, the brothers leaning into weather,
considering time and its contraptions,
and who shall try first, the coin between them
hanging in the air.