Chasse *
White-haired man sits by the window
watching sparrows in the yard.
Red-tailed hawk swoops at the feeder.
Feathers twitch.
The birds are gone.
Stewed prunes in a dish…
the man is drifting.
He’s gliding in his Camel
over France.
Shattered forests, cratered fields
unroll below him,
villages torched,
trenches coiled in wire stars.
“Tell us, Grandpa,
tell our favorite stories,
the ones where you shot Germans in the sky:
how you slumped in your seat
to trick the pilots,
how you spiralled down
then pulled out of the dive.”
He would walk on a beach
during his training
recalling bunkmates taken by the war.
Fokker bullets.
Broken engines.
Leaking gas lines.
The planes bust up like matchsticks
when they fall.
Restless spirits of the air crowded around him
voices shimmering like heat upon the sand.
Across the years he hears them whisper
at the window.
He slumps, the prunes untasted, in his chair.
A second hawk slips out
into the morning.
Wings outstretched, it finds a draft and soars.
Across tobacco fields and ponds
it seeks its quarry
not the sparrows, but their hunter…
the red-tailed hawk.
* A French term adopted by American pilots in the First World War to describe pursuit or combat flying.
My grandfather was a pilot in the World War 1 Air Service. He began his training the fall of 1917 and by autumn of 1918 was flying combat missions in France. When we were little my brother, sister, cousins, and I loved hearing his stories about that time. I remember him sitting at his kitchen table watching the birds. I wonder now what he was thinking.
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