Crypt

In the early spring of 1963, a B-47 pilot lost his life in an ATO-related fire. My memory is vague on this, but I think the wheels did actually lift from the tarmac...that the jet was in the air, and then crashed....

His name was James Meeks. He was a Major in the Air Force. His crewmen were all able to escape, but he was trapped by his own seatbelt, due to negligence by its manufacturer...

That same spring it seemed almost everyone's basement was flooding. The water table was rising, and the earth under our homes was saturated. I mention this, because the night Major Meeks died, I had a dream about him. I dreamed he did not burn to death, after all.


I dreamed
he survived the fire,
only to be drowned
in a small lake,
a flooded quarry
under the sidewalk.
The lid to his crypt
lay in front of our house.

Bits of his flightsuit
were still on fire
floating in the waves
of blood and grease,
his charred hands
still gripping the belt
that would pull him
into the waiting pool.

VFW

Sitting with friends
at a long table cluttered
with bowls of oatmeal
and cold stacks of pancakes,
he holds his coffee mug
with both hands.

And recites the memory
of a cold ditch in Korea,
of hot chinese metal
and smoldering wool,
and the certainty
that he would burst into flames.

Monuments

In a small factory,
passing in close order -
white danby marble,
42 inches high,
13 inches wide.

At the end of the belt
a woman rocks the sanding arm
back and forth
making chalk -
precise hollows
for the black paint that will spell a name:
my son,
born here,
died there,
too young.