Via Negativa, Visiting Uncle Peter’s Grave, Carolina Grasshoppers
VIA NEGATIVA
—in memory of my uncle, Peter Roesch James, Mosquito VI navigator and gunner, 45 Squadron RAF. Killed in Burma, 28 February, 1945.
I
The way a sudden break in a song
makes the song more apparent.
I came to know you only
as the things you were not.
Not a single tooth, said my mother; not a button.
Not a button, not a tooth, not a bolt, not a bootlace.
Not a goggle lens, a dial glass, a whisper
of oil. Not a single slug of rubber.
Not even a rumour of fuselage or bone.
We each came to believe
the story we needed to believe,
and this is how it was that we let you die
several different deaths at once even though
you were given only one.
II
The official report on your death arrived—
my father's doing, the details
assuaging, perhaps, the need for a body. Sometimes,
when the living can endure their losses no longer, words
can do this: sometimes
words stand in for the world.
You are not light walking the curve of your own spillage;
you are not foliage, not smoke, not flame,
not a green so complete it tasted vicious.
Not static on the wireless, cutting out. Not vomit
or blood or the dive
your pilot could not pull out of. You
are not even the sound of your own voice crying out.
Not even the loss of that sound.
Not the gutter of your own throat
flushed with rain. You are only an absence
obligating me to make certain
that the life I have
be enough. And the hope
I have carried, always, is for some, last thing
of which I am not yet aware, and through which you
will at last step forward. Because
what use am I to you, little god of negatives,
if you will not finally appear? It is time.
III
October. Among the robins flocking in the marsh
it seems there is always one who insists on breaking
into the stashed, bone box of his spring repertoire
to sing in protest against his own departure.
Even when his song is lost
behind the static of a world intercepted by rain,
it is there. I feel it. Long, braided
straps of song. It is time.
IV
There was a lover.
And there was you and you were thinking of her and her
white dress. Of her and her white dress.
Of her white dress and the parachute
you didn't have the height or the time
to use; of her white dress as it lifted
and filled and held you
against the drop. There was a lover.
And she remembered you, always, as that one,
unrepeatable moment when
getting dressed once after love
the light, efficient and sophisticated, licked
up the short run of your fly
as the teeth of its zipper locked back together.
VISITING UNCLE PETER'S GRAVE
In the company of three other crews they took off for a bombing attack on a Japanese camp and arrived over the target at about 12.30 hours. The aircraft...was seen to dive onto the target but instead of pulling out at about 2,000 feet, as was to be expected, continued in the dive and flew straight into the ground. The aircraft hit the ground at a very high speed and exploded, so that there can be little doubt as to the fate of the occupants. It is unlikely that we shall ever find out why the aircraft failed to recover from its dive.
—from a letter written by Air Commodore Freebody on the loss of the RAF Mosquito VI crewed by Peter Roesch James (navigator) and Bryan Vincent Draper (pilot) in Burma on the 28 February, 1945
The map is crude and difficult
to decipher; but slowly—plot by plot,
row by row—I make my way
along the cemetery's slim green corridors.
I could find you easily enough, now,
without the Loupe, but I need
you to appear in the way you always
appear: a letter and two numbers in a magnified
circle of print; the rough edges of your grave's
drawn boundaries a mild crumble
of dirt along a fresh-dug ditch.
Where you lie buried with your pilot.
Your death twin. Your darling.
When they found you I suppose your body
and his had everything in common.
There are many such graves
at Taukkyan and I have coloured
the map green because we forget, we forget
that the grass is one long breath. And each week
I pencil a flower onto the small, worn
tray of the page. It is early November.
West, and just beyond
the cemetery's walls, are the Thamin
and the barking deer of Hlawaga park
and, twenty miles south, well off the page, Rangoon
in its gray hammock of rivers. Your grave is a lie
created for the living, because what more
would you have been but a sachet of ash
tucked down in the soil? In the war footage of planes
going down the smoke, literally,
blossoms. Like water; like the chambers water
builds in the frit of its turning
at the base of a fall; then a last, lazy
rain of debris and dirt. We forget, we forget
there is death at the heart of it. In the crucible
of the cockpit you achieved, without choice
and without effort, what every lover strives for,
and yet, not even lovers know what it means
when a body refuses to declare itself
and fall away from another's. And yet
the long tongue of one river simply slides
into the throat of another, and a man can lift
his shadow from the ground and still have it be
his shadow. West, and just beyond
the cemetery's walls are the Thamin
and the barking deer of Hlawaga park
and, twenty miles south, well off the page, Rangoon
in its gray hammock of rivers. Where it is,
already, tomorrow. Peter, even wrestled
to a standstill in the dirt, you cross every threshold
before me. And I do nothing but place
down flowers in your wake. And, when it is finished,
I will steal lines from the mouth of this poem
and then abandon them
in the cemetery's slim green corridors.
And whatever I leave will be evidence,
the marks of a flourish toward permanence.
And whatever I leave will never perish
to make room for anything else.
CAROLINA GRASSHOPPERS
In secondary school, in biology, in order to help us memorize the characteristics of living things, we were given the mnemonic GRIMNER: Growth, Respiration, Irritability, Movement, Nutrition, Excretion and Reproduction. This was The Word for the facts, for observable things. It said absolutely nothing about what it felt like to be alive.
—Journal entry
Mr. Davis gave us The Word, placing
beside each one of us a spiral-bound, splash-proof
guide to dissection and our own
special-order Carolina grasshopper
submerged underwater in a chipped, high-sided dish
because, underwater, its strong legs anchored
in wax, it was easy
to seduce even that golden body open.
It took almost no effort to sever that knot
of muscle, release the forewing and set it adrift
like a beautiful, lost oar; and even less to tease
out a hind wing and marvel at its burning
hem of yellow and how it would have folded,
fan-like, against the body when not it use. Imagine
having wings and choosing not to use them.
That year, reading Whitman, I came to believe
in desire as a state of grace—the promise
of terminal happiness—and went on to test
this belief in a windbreak of trees beyond
the playing field where we were sent, in mixed
pairs, to kneel over two square-feet of earth
and undergrowth and pass the whole afternoon
counting and naming. The body is impossible
to account for, and if it all comes down to a single
word then let it be something worthy, a match
for what I discovered in a windbreak
with a boy who turned the dark purse
of my body inside out, who was all
muscle and imperative, who would later enlist
and die, facedown, in the wet heath of the Falklands.
Who, I want to believe, had time to remember
the way he and I lay down and the rise
of his own excitement at the slight resistance
of his buttons and the small squeak
as the last one finally released and my wet mouth
hovered carefully over his nipples, the sudden rattle
of breath as some part of him broke free.
That it was April, so the new and unused
lips of the blooms had parted, but only
just. I remember the way his eyes never closed
completely as we did whatever it was
that passed for sex: that slit
of brightness beneath his lashes—just a glint—
as if some small insect had decided, suddenly, to open
its wings toward the myth of another world.
