Like a pesky gnat waking me from a nap
\nto late afternoon\u2019s softer light, a biplane\u2019s
\nold-timey drone broke through my memory
\nbarrier, a porous membrane in the brain.
\nAssociations slipped free as from the wrists
\nof an acrobat who works high wire without a net.<\/p>\n
Aficionados of model planes tether
\ntheir balsa and canvas airframes to handsets,
\nletting a radius\u00a0of threaded metal wire
\npivot round the center\u00a0where they turn,
\nearth-bound pilots spinning\u00a0dizzily like
\ndancers who cannot fix\u00a0a focal spot but
\nfollow with their eyes\u00a0the counterclockwise
\npaths their crafts inscribe in the hemisphere
\nof trajectories in which they are bound.<\/p>\n
As with a wand, our cabled pilots scrawl
\nindecipherable script across the sky,
\nlike children flashing sparklers who leave
\nin afterglow scribbles they alone can read,
\nfirefly swerves and jots, the stuff of memory.<\/p>\n
*** It was\u00a0understandable\u00a0for a boy in post-WW2 Texas to be fascinated with flying. Hellcats, Messerschmidts and Zeros were persisting artifacts of our collective imagination\u00a0\u2013 proof that the effects of war do not cease once a war is over.<\/i><\/p>\n 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\u00a0into my memories, binding them\u00a0on their own circumscribed course.<\/i><\/p>\n 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 \u00a0flickers languish then expire in the humid night. Much like memory itself.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n
\nMemory was a favorite theme of my thirties, split between Montr\u00e9al and Berkeley, as I remember them. One exception is\u00a0the recent poem \u00a0Metamorphosis<\/a>, which was informed as much by the physical ailments of senescence as by the psychological turbulence\u00a0of middle age, the epoch\u00a0when you first realize you are wading out into deeper and deeper water –\u00a0and you will only be able to swim as long as you can.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n