Where the River Runs Deep

I hand out copies of “Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner.”

I only chose this poem because we can “get it” in one class period, and still there is so much to see. I want them to know how much there is to see in a small space. To look, as though through a microscope, and see a whole landscape.

“No one should try to understand this poem yet, or tell us what it means. That would be like trying to tell us what a microscopic cell means before making any observations. SO for now, all we are going to do is look and listen and make observations.”

I read them the poem. We start in with the questions.

“How can his mother be sleeping?”

“What’s flak?”

“There are only two rhymes: the second line and the last line.”

“But also there are rhyming words in the fourth line. ‘Black flak’ and ‘nightmare fighters.’”

“What is the ‘dream of life?’”

“Why is he loosed from it?”

“Great question. Why does it not say ‘severed, ‘separated,’ ‘divorced,’ ‘torn,’ ‘removed,’ ‘ripped,’ or ‘taken’ from the dream of life?”

“When was it written?”

“What’s a ball-turret?”

I show them pictures of a ball-turret on a B-17 Flying Fortress. I draw a picture of one on the white board. I demonstrate the “hunched’ posture of the ball-turret gunner. They may be beginning to see it.

“So what feelings come out here?”

“It feels like he is vulnerable. He’s in a glass ball.”

“Where?”

“In the belly of the plane.”

“The belly?”

Some one practically jumps out of a chair.

“He ‘fell’ from his mother’s sleep. When he was in his mother’s womb he was hunched.”

“And?”

“He was warm, and bloody, and protected.””

“You mean the blood was not the blood of death, but of life?”

“Yeah.”

“And when a child is born what happens?”

“They wipe the blood off and…”

"And do what?”

“Wrap the baby up and keep it warm and give it to its mother.”

“So when the child opens its eyes it sees what?”

“Its mother. Protection. Warmth. Love.”

“And what does it “wake” to here?”

“Black flak, Nightmare fighters. Death. Blood. Terror. War.”

“Is this boy/man free?”

“No, he’s born into the womb of a war plane.”

“So did he get to live, to know the dream of life?”

“No. The poem is only five lines…It’s like it barely lives.”

“He only lives for four lines before they wash him out with a hose.”

“How about this five line poem,” I say.

Row Row

Row your boat

Gently down the stream

Merrily merrily merrily

Life is but a dream…

“Did he get to have this dream,” I ask.

“No. He was practically born frozen. Cold.”

“Like what.”

“It says his wet fur froze.”

“How does that picture form in your heads when you hear the words? Is he wearing fur?”

“Yeah, didn’t pilots wear fur coats then?”

“Yes.”

“So he seems like an animal.”

“Vulnerable. He’s just born. He was scared and hot when the plane took off. His sweat froze. Then he gets shot. The ball-turret is full of blood, but he is not even there. They have to wash him out.”

“No feelings at all.”

“He’s like a little animal that was born blood-covered but did not get to open his eyes to the dream of life or his mother’s eyes.”

They keep talking. I keep trying to stop them, but they keep seeing other things, all the. connections between the words. Finally someone begins to draw out a bigger view.

“It seems like normally you would want to say this is a picture of freedom—flying high above the earth, seeing everything, looking down over the landscape and seeing everything.”

“Except?”

“Except he is trapped in this state.”

“State of…”

“War. This state of being. The state of the government placing him in plane. Hunched up like a fetus."

“He’s not free because his only choice is to shoot and die.”

Someone points to the Matisse poster, “Icarus” which hangs next to the white-board.

It’s like he is that guy, falling from the sky.”

“There he still seems alive, because we can see his heart. The red spot on his body."

“Y’all, did you know that Matisse made that work during World War II?”

On the board are the dates of World War II.—1939-1945. Jarrell wrote his poem in 1945. The poem I hand out for Thursday was written in 1939. “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” by W.H. Auden. They will make connections I can’t imagine.

****

I read a story called, “The Kiss.” It has happened over and over: the kids may be thinking about what a kiss is, or wanting to know what a kiss is, but they have no way of really knowing. I had been talking about what a kiss might be, what it shouldn’t be, how one might feel when a real kiss happens. A kiss is not gotten, it is given. This I know.

In the story I read, a kiss is given by a dying woman to a teenage boy. The woman is in a convalescent home and her skin is practically falling off her body and she can’t speak. Only a moaning whisper escapes her dry lips. The boy is there for community service, to wheel the old people around the facility, help them play Bingo, and light their cigarettes. The woman wants the boy to hold her hand. As he passes her in the hall, she reaches out to him and pulls him toward her. Then she pulls him ever so close to her face, and she places a kiss on his cheek. The boy is not sure what to do. He is terrified, never having been so close to death. But he feels the only thing to do is to kiss her back, and he places a kiss on the soft skin of her cheek. He doesn’t know what he is doing, but he does what must be done.

What has been given? What has been created? How has death been held at bay? Earlier in the day we discussed whether it was possible to become immortal by living well, by making lives grow out of our lives, by making something that would outlive us, as Robert Hayden said we must do, as a way of making Frederick Douglass liver forever. Can we live forever, in some manner, even in this cage of mortality? If we must die, how may we also not die. It was proposed that we live on by living well, by giving something of ourselves to the world beyond, and that would be a measure of freedom within the limitations of earthly existence.

“Like in Wislawa Symborska’s poem, where she says the written word is the ‘revenge of the mortal hand,’” says Jesse. “That’s what she is doing by showing the boy what a kiss is.”

“The old woman was giving something of the utmost value before she died. As though she couldn't die until she gave that kiss away,” says someone else.

“And what did her insistence on giving that kiss to the boy create?”

“It created love, in him for her…So her love is passed on, so he can know it. And now we know it from him.”

Later when we talk about “In Memory of W.B, Yeats,” we began to see that the only thing that counters death is words spoken from the heart, given out freely, even as the shadow of death hovers all around. “In the deserts of the heart, let the healing fountain start.” If each of us is “in the cell of himself almost wholly convinced of his freedom,” then this is the way out.

****

It’s a rainy, misty morning up on the North Branch River. The woods re mostly green but a few leaves are touched by yellow and red, the ferns are browning, shivering in the breeze and shining in the rain. We are gathered under the trees in the wet grass, wearing mud boots and waders glove. Nylon pants are duct-taped to keep the river out. Two dogs are racing around, and licking our faces as we have morning meeting.

“Tal, why are you so grumpy.”

“Not grumpy. Sleepy. Tired. Friday. Long days behind. Long day ahead.”

A ninth grade boy leans into his mate, causing them both to stumble. I give him a stern head-masterly glance.

“What?” He exclaims. “I’m awake, eager, and ready to learn!”

They are holding hands, lined up five-abreast in an all-school phalanx. Eric has them follow him, first walking then running, making them turn and re-turn. They are imitating the width and rush and flow of the river. In the turns the outside “water” must speed up. The inside water must go slow. They head through the woods to find the river, which has filled up over night with all the rain. They’ll be walking down-river, making observations about erosion and flow-rate, ostensibly quietly and meditatively. But already I can hear the shouts and laughter downstream in the woods as the water pours in, filling their boots where the river runs deep.