Pilot Stars
Open window; eucalyptus scent; the ever-slightly
slackening heat. Given the way the day has gone,
she's waited awhile to turn off the lamp in the guest room
which, she remembers, had once been the room
her mother kept when the two of them were fighting.
She has come home to visit her father, an Air Force pilot
retired for years, who lives alone, and who, he'd
written to her late last week, was "discovered with a form
of cancer." Her father hasn't wanted to speak of it;
she has tried to press him. Like most people
of her generation, unlike those of his, she believes
such talks are compulsory, some tested proof
of a power in words all evening she'd kept insisting on,
to the point that they have argued in ways (and,
most likely, from similar needs) they had throughout
what he still calls her "college days." Three hours later,
and she can't help feeling . . . what?—angry,
frightened, ashamed of herself for upsetting him
when she'd really only wanted to comfort.
It just doesn't have to be like this. And yet of course
she knows it does. Knows what's set in motion now
will be there at the end. And so, lying in bed
with the lamp still on, she closes her eyes and tries to sleep,
closes her eyes and watches the way the blood
wells up behind the lids and, mixed with tiny specks
of light, becomes a night sky flecked with stars.
And it's as if through the dark of memory they've come,
all sensed and intended and pointing a way
when the frozen compass locks in place
in the green-glow cockpit's chill, where it's 1956
and she's sailing above the ocean ten thousand feet
in her father's lap, sustained by an ancient
spine-ticking shine and watching his free hand
check them off on a night map figured with a sextant:
Lyra, Cygnus, Aquila, resetting the crosshairs,
then banking west toward a hunter's moon,
and like another constellation purled out on the dark,
the islands slowly rolling over the far-flung
boundaries of the southern sky. And it's on her skin
as she's lying there, the salt and shine
of leaning into him through the tight half-circle
of that moonward bend, then leveling it out,
leveling the world in one loosening turn
for a girl lightheaded at the prospect of a life
taken up somehow on the scattered narratives
of all those names, those heart-logged syllables
by which her father had found a way
(o, how far the fall from childhood seems)
to chart his passage between heaven and earth.
From the quiet in the house, her father might've been
asleep by then. It was after one. The heavy air
of late September still hung stock-still in the lamplit room.
Then as had happened for the last two nights—
had she not stayed awake to listen? would she not
stay away for nights to come?—the footsteps began,
back and forth in the upstairs room, the slow,
incessant, solitary dying that would go on
another eighteen months, and by which it seemed
some terrible mourning had already begun
to extinguish the light-points one by one,
until the dark like the dark she fell through then
was suddenly storyless, boundless, and blank.
(c) 1999 by Sherod Santos. All rights reserved.
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