Like a pesky gnat waking me from a nap
to late afternoon’s softer light, a biplane’s
old-timey drone broke through my memory
barrier, a porous membrane in the brain.
Associations slipped free as from the wrists
of an acrobat who works high wire without a net.
Aficionados of model planes tether
their balsa and canvas airframes to handsets,
letting a radius of threaded metal wire
pivot round the center where they turn,
earth-bound pilots spinning dizzily like
dancers who cannot fix a focal spot but
follow with their eyes the counterclockwise
paths their crafts inscribe in the hemisphere
of trajectories in which they are bound.
As with a wand, our cabled pilots scrawl
indecipherable script across the sky,
like children flashing sparklers who leave
in afterglow scribbles they alone can read,
firefly swerves and jots, the stuff of memory.
***
Memory was a favorite theme of my thirties, split between Montréal and Berkeley, as I remember them. One exception is the recent poem Metamorphosis, which was informed as much by the physical ailments of senescence as by the psychological turbulence of middle age, the epoch when you first realize you are wading out into deeper and deeper water – and you will only be able to swim as long as you can.
It was understandable for a boy in post-WW2 Texas to be fascinated with flying. Hellcats, Messerschmidts and Zeros were persisting artifacts of our collective imagination – proof that the effects of war do not cease once a war is over.
Father pursued his hobby of control line model flying until the burdens of parenthood scotched that frivolity. By that time the smell and fumes of glue and vials of enamel and Cox engine nitro fuel, as well as the alternating Doppler buzz of circulating tethered toy craft, had been incised into my memories, binding them on their own circumscribed course.
It is a short leap from model aircraft to the detonations of cherry bombs and firecrackers, which we boys thought it fun to insert into anthills. And then to the wonder of ploying sparklers in the dark, swirling cursive replica of fireflies whose flickers languish then expire in the humid night. Much like memory itself.