In memory of Magnus Gisaslon, Royal Canadian Air Force, shot down over the Atlantic while accompanying a convoy to Britain, June 1944.
Cousin I can come no closer to you than here,
this last of Jutland, a claw of sand that locks
on the Kattegat. Camouflage-grey, the sea
gathers its notional forms, eludes all form.
The battle-happy Norwegian kings are under there,
particled among their people's legends.
And you, the distant cousin my mother asked
we should remember sometimes in our prayers,
who fell seaward when to tumble from the sky
was routine as a child's nightly prayer,
casual as the cigar a stroller might
flick from a sea-wall. Fish and weed
rot in this milds dawn wind that blows from Russia.
And again, as in my war-delirious boyhood,
I see the seconds of that, your most extreme
reconnaissance flight, try to track that curve
of mind that hurtles clear of nineteen forty-four
toward a name in a child's unfeeling prayer.
Mercuric-veined, the sky unfolds Eurasia
as all the gauges of your body drop
to zero. Almost inhuman, you're now a focal point
where cannon shells and fingers reaching out
to take a telegram intersect. Already
yes, already, clothes in a barrack await
new owners, paperwork waits to free you from your life.
Now the different griefs of friends home on you
like tracers, outreaching luck, the self's possession.
Now the cowlings howl with the failure of physics,
the failure of time to pause or skip. Who could predict
the Atlantic might flip upon its head and veer
toward your perspex, spin you through the scenes
of what has oddly merely been a life?
With simple candour Europe rotates its lives below you;
duty sergeants snore in depot towns,
factory girls emerge from basements
into cities suddenly weathered like limestone,
and whole populations go shunted down branchlines
toward the nowhere grids of wire and floodlights.
Who will believe this is a planet's culture
using its pastures? Yes in the ruined churches
dust, quiet for centuries, is airborne again,
catching the flecks of modern light.
There are graves of Upper Egypt will lead us here
with intricate reasons, amazing sum of causes,
ore for public libraries. And yet these instants
are your threshhold. I come from its safer side,
have bussed through zones of yellow flowers
exchanged goodwill on separate sides of language.
with fellows whose eyes I can imagine locked to gunsights,
intent upon some lone circling aircraft,
to strike there, high in heaven, a flaring match
and watch it fall from void to void. Cousin
you are the only kin my family lost to war.
In this, the anniversary of Dresden,
I should suppose my mother felt your loss
but lifelong I shied from asking her about you/
Now you and she are lost to time as children's prayers.
The east has silvered like a wing, the se
runs in aerofoil glitter and covers
all that might have been disclosed about you.