Skies My Father Taught Me - Inside My Father's Bomber Dream Redux Poem by Warren Falcon

What from your fathers you received as heir [or air],
Acquire if you would possess it! - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

An homage to my WW2 bomber pilot father as well
as two American poets, Richard Hugo and Hart Crane]

for the Major, my father, an airman, not a sailor
for Richard Hugo, an airman, and a poet
for Hart Crane, not a sailor (but he loved them)
a poet too, and fellow bedlamite

Take air away and even fire falls - Richard Hugo

Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry...
Descend and of the curveship lend a myth to God. - Hart Crane


Prologue

Again, what is remembered.

The chase is on.
In dream, sailors this time.


Beyond the Narrows*
starlings murmur.
Beneath the Verrazano*
some crouch low over
cheap shots, guarding
each while outside gypsies**
wait, drivers names hard
to say but they belong,
this city where citizens
names, no matter the
sound of them, translate
as Everyone from Elsewhere
and so belong here where
being drunk is only weather
and the river port, old,
grand, will pass for any
other but for codes of
odd graffiti:


ASK THE WELDER
WHO'S YOUR MOTHER


REAL WINNERS CHOOSE THEIR GOD


FROM HERE TO ETERNITY
5 BUCKS TO CONEY & BACK

Implication: come to terms:

on this manic strand the
franks are speechless in
the hand relenting to degrees
of gray mustard smeared
as the wind also gray beside
the ruined amusements,
thrills, rides plummeting
stick children hard and
down where fresh girls
defy gravity while they
can curving in cues between
tracks and sand. Impatient,
they blot their brightened
lips, stain tissues thin between
World Wars, still they cry
out a dead poet's name.

....

Interlude - Refueling Mid-Air

A lone crane squints, its good
eye busy, a study in stillness.
Or is it avian will gone to muck
all feathers and no faith that
matters, stuck, it poses, puts
on a zennish show all butoh***
in the shallows.

Its bad eye
skims the narrows,
its curved neck smooth,
feminine, as is

the distant bridge
curved, feminine too,
don't call it grace but
acknowledge the temptation.

Pace yourself.

To south wind

throw sand,
make demands

though men in
bombers forever take flight

bereaving wind sheer still.
Hard evidence is there.

What's to believe in?
Fear's the only thing real,

the only god one
can depend upon, Lift,

some few others assist,
Dare, Weight, and Soft Landing.


Let us mention again
fresh girls on the rides but

let us return also
to the presenting scene,

stare bird blind

and lend no myth
at all

for there
as here death

is a generic dump
with glutted gulls,

soft waves
lapping all
about lull
and Stop Time

or so says the
yellowed script
in sand,
the hint is there or

spin or drift, some
thing suggested where
breath as darkness is

by design -

streetlights
turn themselves on,

hum in low tones
metric,

the boardwalk's
hat trick, sudden

electric paintbrush
strokes each plank
to silver sheen

voiding solidity.


Benched blonds
unrestrained

keen on in
staggered rhyme

forgetting they once
were German swans
Grimm and pale.

Posing as cranes,
they still forget a
dead poet's name.

...

Flying Lesson

Though he tried
to teach me once,

a void kid
avoidant of air and
heights,

Here's how to purposefully
stall in flight he proposes.

Not at all
interested in the favor
of the lesson

my answer's
a loud scream and
piss pants,

no chance in
flight to stall a bladder,
his disgust

palpable,
my head catches a
glancing knuckle
which

does not make me calmer.


Many years,
much is forgiven
or lost in cloud,

I've no idea still what
the inside of my father's
bomber

looks like, how
it smells laden
with fear

perhaps passed
off as gun powder, fuel,
flak flame

and smoke so
black and deep in the
pores

it stinks a lifetime.

Yours. Also mine by blood.

Still, your son
is proud though fear is
the meal

you often fed
dutifully eaten with sliced
bread so

white white
light in the shaking
hand,

dread was
the tarnished knife and fork,
simple

instruments to
quell the terror in you
served up to sons,

at least one
of them.

I know now your fear
made mine, yet, many
years in the making, this:

Dessert is a son's pardon.

...

In The Dream

You nod, wink,
all's understood,
unsaid but conveyed -

not too late the father-hope.


If you have one more bomb to
drop let go let's do it together.
God has chosen me and It wants
revenge,

REVENGE the name on a sudden
wall, a painted scene, swamp in
black light 3-D bizarre, iridescent
Spanish moss dense, tangled, sways,
hints an invisible wind, there you
are, an old portrait, in uniform,
good looks, sad, even gentle eyes
I dimly recall in person, a smile
noncommittal - the war is on.


Suddenly I lose stomach for it all.

I forgive everything.

You are young, a bomber pilot
dropping heavy kisses backed
up in the bomb-bay.

There's a wall somewhere
central in every capitol of
the world with your name on it.

Promise, I'll drop your name, not
bombs, every son's chance I get.

See all these sailors here
in packs? I'd kiss them all,
say to them,

Love your old man,

what he's seen is in his eyes,
finally dare to look hard there,
the face is yours,
no talking allowed,
no guessing either,

watch his hands,
what they do.

Never say

it's over.

Love, I mean.


CODA

Come Sunday mornings that bar
beneath the bridge ushers rusted
ships in and out the harbor.

Bodies of birds fall from girders pale blue.

Watching them fall's a kind
of sport, a free shot per bird,

bad whiskey's piss hue dilutes,
bottom shelf's always cruel,
both winners and losers choose
what's offered or what's left,
the one bottle's chipped, glass
in the throat is aftertaste what
burns the blind day through
though dawn's reputedly new.

Look for signs of the living.

One takes what's given.

Nothing for dead starlings.


Some simple lessons are learned:

grant clumsy purity one free pass,

go unjudged or go unnoticed,


hunger's there in those young faces,

shirt tail's out, sailors stark stand

stiff and votive scrying horizons,

compos dementis****, inebriant but native.


They salute distant fins Atlantic,

low haze over supplicant water.

Young, they obey orders,

no rank higher than father.


For some confession comes.

Later knees provide no choices.

Comes the rejoicing later if at all.



Then It Happened

His fear of falling.

He flies out the window,
hospital for Vets, wide-eyed
not looking down or back

in the long-leaving mostly-already
done to Otherwise beyond thinner
air.

The contrail there is tight until
it's not. Weather does such things
to water.

In the end it's all about condensation.

Eyes narrower, the old Major
cashes in his bomber's bet
on 'sky's the limit' or better.

He was a weather man
after the war, war and
weather tethered, knotted,
rather, tightly.

He taught me weather maps,
cold front and warm, the paper
that mysteriously rendered
what is all around, inside and
out, was soft, delicate, signs
and symbols moved when the
map moved.

Poetry maps weather, I tell him,
in one of our last beach trips
together.

I wanted to be a ballet dancer
when I was just a little boy but
we were poor and I was one of
twelve so that wouldn't do.

I shudder with grief to hear
it, how different it would all
be for him between dirt and
sky, how different I would be.

I saw clearly, It has fallen upon
me to dance, to fly that way.



His cold hand in my hand I'm thinking
'father' 'leather' 'strap' or 'whip';

as yet to praise
forget the net
we wide as the blue
he knew,
maps of, guided
planes through
from tower to
radar green
sweeps the eyes
blips in neon
green air, souls
up there moving
on, through, out
into darkness
the work is there
lit by sheen head
bent forward
staring, mic in
hand, special
language spoken
in the come
and go.

Come home, sleep.
Quiet we grow, he's
home, avoid at all
cost, boss is back,
watch your back,
then awake he's
to garden, to mow,
to cut chosen trees,
he and I on our
supplicant knees
two man saw,
man and boy
tugging away

'make the cut straight! '

I couldn't, dread
is distraction and
geometry is hell,
I know well the
age of trees by
wings, just count
my eyes to know
how many years
I avoided his.

As yet to praise
forfeit the net
we hide narrow
choices weather
forces

but a boy
can only
choose
avoidance
and living
a lie, if god
is in His
heaven then
I'll fly away
but then
remember
I can't cuz
in sky he
knew his
way.


Strange to
praise this
way but dreams
do better,

this:


Me still in the long
meander on

uneven cobbled
street, bruised
stones, probably
Roman, laid in
third century

but in England
or Scotland,

a corner turned,

he's crouching
at ease alone in
uniform,

trench coat black,
black boots,

he's 25 or barely
but surely at war,

looks up at me an
now old man,

smiles sweetly,
stands to greet me,
to embrace.

I do, he does.









____
*The Verrazano Narrows Bridge, one of many great bridges of New York City, connects Staten Island and Brooklyn at the narrow channel where the Hudson River flows into the Atlantic Ocean.

**Gypsy cabs - aa taxi that is licensed only to respond to telephone calls, typically one that nevertheless cruises for prospective fares.

***Butoh - Butoh [bu-tō], often translated as 'Dance of Darkness, ' rose out of the ashes of post-World War II Japan as an extreme avant-garde dance form that shocked audiences with its grotesque movements and graphic sexual allusions when it was introduced in the 1950s…Performers move awkwardly and slowly with shuffling steps, looking more like zombies than dancers. Their faces twitch; their bodies shake with tension. The acknowledgement of Butoh as a significant art form is now firmly established in Europe and America in addition to Japan. At the same time, the 'practice' of Butoh has grown as a way, like meditation or yoga, to gain self-awareness and wake up.
- excerpted from Tricycle Magazine article by Jeff Goldberg, November 13,2017.

****compos dementis - I've added the 'de-' to mentis for dementis as in demented.
compos mentis is an adjective meaning 'having full control of one's mind; sane.'in