The Air Base at Châteauroux, France

In the American schoolyard where we lunged headfirst onto the rocky ground scrab- bling for a ball as if for love, the crossed chalk- line still electrified our tough boyish hearts, and no one much cared for such exotic gods as loomed up out of the Palatine Hills in the required guidebooks dumped in heaps behind our makeshift goal. We knew what we knew. Sweatstains darkened our blue school shirts while our fathers’ fighters strafed the mock- ups in the practice fields, never far enough from town it didn’t thunder all day through the blackened cottages’ stony stares locked up tight behind their shot bolts; nor through the evening, either, when drifting home, stripped to the waist, we’d dance feet-chalked across the marketplace like young, uneasy gods, a little drunk on our shame, our power.