Aviators

It was just the other day I went looking
for those aviator sunglasses
that once belonged to my father
and found myself thinking of his story
about washing out of flight school
— Army Air Corps, Waco, Texas, 1947 —
the flight test he failed on account
of one moment’s inattention — or was it
hesitation — some intricacy about throttle
and stick — a maneuver that required
this counterintuitive sequence
of power, flaps and trim, to induce a deliberate stall.

He’d mishandled for a second, then recovered.
How it crushed him when
in a glance to his mirrors he saw
as his instructor, in place in the cockpit behind him,
watching, calmly logged the mistake.

There’s a photograph my father kept from that time.
He’s dressed in flight gear,
his parachute pack hangs, straps loose, behind him.
His hand rests on the lead edge of his aircraft’s wing;
an ear-to-ear grin on his face, he wears those glasses.

Aglow in Texas desert sunlight, he hasn’t yet learned
of his failure.

Washing out, as it was called, was a ritual process
he described for me many times: the way the cadet enters
the room where a panel has convened on his flight status;
the square-cornered military gate and salute required,
taking seat — only the three inches of it allowed, back straight,
eyes forward. They’d reviewed his weeks of training and performance,
every detail, and finally, though their decision was already plain,
they asked him if he thought he was a good pilot.

He told them that — he knew — he was a good pilot
and saw only out of the corner of his eye
as his instructor smiled.

Dad would point out, whenever he recounted the story,
that had he not washed out he would have ended up
flying combat missions over Korea, the brave, bold fighter pilot
he’d always dreamed of being
and that war was rough going early on.

He might have survived, but likely would never have come back
east and met my mother — made this life.

Mostly, he sounded thankful when he told me this.
There were those times it seemed he was also,
in some small strange way, sorry.

You’re gone twenty years now, Mom died ten years back.
There’re things she told me about you in those ten years’ difference,
things she said she once thought she was meant to save you from.

You know how she hated it when you got back to flying,
you and your small single-engine Cessna — that we couldn’t afford.
I’d accompany you on the occasional flight and not enjoy it;
this my way of not quite taking sides in the conflict.

In the co-pilot seat, I won’t touch the controls.
We’re at altitude and it’s just the same world, small, slow,
dull and loud, contained with this uneasy thought of falling.
I lean my head against the side window glass and look down.

Now our shadow moves along the dry grass of an open field below us
— the edge of a wood and, suddenly, I have some sense of our speed.
I want to tell you but I can’t make myself heard above the engine noise

and your attention is elsewhere, as I know it’s supposed to be,
though I can’t quite discern where in all the broad sky.

Those glasses, a greenish black, wire metal frames:
the polarized lenses only admit a certain kind of light.

TD
an earlier version of this poem appears in oddball magazine