{"id":3693,"date":"2016-11-05T22:53:19","date_gmt":"2016-11-06T05:53:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alteritas.net\/GXL\/?p=3693"},"modified":"2016-11-08T09:28:52","modified_gmt":"2016-11-08T17:28:52","slug":"calligraphy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alteritas.net\/GXL\/?p=3693","title":{"rendered":"Calligraphy for Davo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"fighter_plane_contrails_in_the_sky\"<\/a><\/p>\n

What has grazed against the sky and left
\nas seeping wounds these tangled vines?
\nLike drenched brushes dabbing at blank
\nparchment, Zero and Hellcat have turned
\ndifferential lift into veils of condensation.
\nBut the hand behind these brushes is the foil
\nin our dogfight mind. We all fly cursively
\nin dreams, taking roofs for runways, clearing
\nwith somatic leaps jagged lines of grasping
\ntrees, warding off with myoclonic airborne
\nkicks the threatening clutch of others.
\nIn the special effects of oneiric flight
\nwe emulate not birds but martial
\nfigurations of vertiginous selves.<\/p>\n

***
\nThis material has been floating around for decades but reached this definitive \u2014 I hope anyway \u2014 form following an exchange with Uncle Dave, mentioned here before in the notes to <\/i>Tethering<\/a>. Another recent poem, <\/i>Skywriting<\/a>, had caught his attention because of shared family history, on my paternal side, of control line model aviation.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Also, by way of association with another war story, \u00a0the memorial I wrote<\/a> for my namesake Uncle George on the maternal side stirred up in him memories of a pilgrimage he, Davo, took in 1997 to visit Peleliu Island, one of the most horrific stages in what is known as the Pacific theater of WW2, September-November, 1944. The carnage there was a Pacific counterpart to that suffered at the battle of Bruy\u00e8res in northeast France at the same time. Uncle George had perished at Bruy\u00e8res, where I traveled in 1999 in search of information and knowledge about him.<\/i><\/p>\n

The poem itself fits into a\u00a0sequence of mute or sonnets, a venerable literary form usually rhymed but in any case based on sets of positive integrers within the number 14, though few literary types see it this way.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

No one but me is likely to notice the wormholes opening in this poem \u2014 those unsuspected passageways which lead from a word or image off to many other notional or\u00a0emotional sites. For example, to mention one simple word-set, \u201cmyoclonic\u201d here and \u201capneic\u201d in <\/i>Beauty Sleep<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Yet I cannot easily explain the existential\u00a0<\/i>wormholes<\/i><\/a> which connect the clustered, honeycombed events Peleliu-like beneath these texts, especially the mystery in the fact that both Uncle Dave and myself set off unbeknownst at roughly the same time to the same conceptional shrine, WW2 and its victims.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

Of course one way of explaining them would be just to say that Davo and I have lived in the same times.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n

< Pastis<\/a><\/strong><\/i>. Photo < Wiki Commons: \u201cFighter plane contrails mark the sky over Task Force 58, 19 June 1944\u201d.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/span><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What has grazed against the sky and left as seeping wounds these tangled vines? Like drenched brushes dabbing at blank parchment, Zero and Hellcat have turned differential lift into veils of condensation. But the hand behind these brushes is the foil in our dogfight mind. We all fly cursively in dreams, taking roofs for runways, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Calligraphy for Davo”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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