Calvin Thomas, Jr.

To airmen crossing and communicant With orders of this field, no landing here But by the grace of God; no postulant Piloting earthward should abuse his fear: Trust in the instruments which fall their round, Tonight the only ceiling is the ground; Zero, from nothing into nothing made, Signifies all of altitude that stayed. Notice the fog that makes me all but blind; Here in the tower my skeleton will do To signal you. I am for all your kind Tonight’s full complement and only crew. Airmen, I hope you read loud and clear; Your radios sound happy and sincere: Roger, you say, and dive for wreaths of holly Thinking the next voice heard will be as jolly. Suggest you take along the death’s-head flag And hope that waving it will set you free. Judgment, like flights, may be a game of tag And you can shake and plead the Varsity. Say that team spirit was your only motive: You shot them up and did a locomotive. What if there is a temporary fetter? Christ understands. He also got his letter. I have you, heroes, holding each your course: You shot them up a little, and you grope Tonight with neither memory nor remorse; My skull is watching in the radarscope. I marvel as I track your sure downfall How you can navigate or fly at all For thinking of the tallies without log Until you make an error in this fog.

When bodies broken and all bodies seared Are counted up, uncrusted, tagged as feared, We know next day the scene will stand alone On pages white and mindless of the bone. Shall notice recognize beyond the burned, Or caption past the people tritely charred, Related dusty partness with the term Antiquity, the sense of death in stone And knowledge of the previously marred? On battlefields of Troy or Tuscany Or other places where techniques engaged, When warrior fell, or blade or boy enraged, Of them did campfire journalists of song Forget collective going, all but pathos, In wretchedness and fact of having gone? Accuse the gnostic grammar of old wars: It maims our grasp of accidental death Past putting down of papers to decry Their overlooking what it means to die.

The quick-sliding cape of mind Drags wrinkled on a dusty floor, A party dress, Sagging from those shoulders of a smile that stalks through crooked time followed by a goat nipping the petticoat. Scape-goat, grin out loud. Make the cloak a shroud. He whinnys through the nose, paws the trailing hem and strikes a fawning pose. Tight-clamped, the clasp of tin Tears cloth it won’t undo. Before the gown slips down. A rent . . . which lets the darkness through.

I see the ships, the plotted crash, The stateroom’s purgatory trash, The waiting wedged and still no splash. There is the torch that burns not through Unless it drowns the sailor crew Shoring the bulkhead pinning you. And then the priest who, being ill, Intones through steel the bitter pill: This tomb is your last confession grille. I think of you awake in bed, Praying what all the voyage said: Have done with dying and be dead. It is a pride in loneliness Like some propriety of dress That shuns the water meant to bless; My hand as from a magnet pole Works to the Sunday dipping bowl To spot my tie and cross my soul.

This is about heroes, and you should know I do not mean old men with membranous snow Already patching them on hand and cheek; I mean the medaled models from the Greek On whom the air force lavishes technique Like tennis lessons and engineering toys Given at schools for preparatory boys. Say what you will, this flyer on his base Who attends airdromes is the immortal ace Training to come out of some urgent East Greater astride his apocalyptic beast Than any movie star: the new high priest. To glimpse him people will abandon cover And in his thunder die as for a lover. Pious and helmeted he lives these nones Attentive to the voices in his phones And calculating when will be the ides Through his impatience with the time he bides In long equations as the slide rule slides; There is no telling the ominous from calm In practice runs to drop a perfect bomb. Nourished and celibate, tanned, tall, erect As he navigates and crosshairs intersect, He dreams a lissome girl and highschool kiss: Physicians have no thought of mending this; The natural death is one he may not miss: Whoever said time steals without a sound? It makes a noise of bandage being wound. Little by little grows the good machine Preening equipment as pterodactyls preen; And when the night pins down the firmament He goes aloft to fly by instrument Limning the stars on graphs where light is bent: To fly in squadron and to walk in squad, This is the double-natured demigod.