The Life of the Ball Turret Gunner

After Randall Jarrell’s “Death of the Ball Turret Gunner”

The sound of his anxious breath,
labored in the tightening mask,
seems his whole fearful world
in this moment encircled by the dark.
He cannot remember where he is.

Then his eyes open revealing
not the glass and metal cage
that once had trapped and sheltered him,
but this somber, grey-white room,
filled with monitors and tubes.

It is now, not then, and death
becomes the old acquaintance,
clicking through the room with a cane,
smiling, then nodding, and passing by—
how did death get so old and still not die?

Then, lifetimes before, he’d folded
himself, fetal and fretting,
butt facing the earth, as he’d waited,
with eyes growing cold from seeing
the endlessness of pale blue air.

That air had soon rattled and roared
when the black bursts of smoky flak
had flowered across the indifferent sky—
he’d shake in his cocoon, with chilly waves
of sweat across his gooseflesh skin.

He’d watched the other planes
falling broken through the air,
like injured birds, ill-used toys—
a wing spiraling downward, the rest
sliding endlessly to fiery hell.

Sometimes he’d see chutes, for
just a moment his chest relaxing,
until a body, spread-eagled, spiraling down
like a penny top—became a silent scream
falling through the empty space.

Fragile and young, he’d hung in the air,
like a circus trick gone sour with fear,
and watched fighters streak across his sights
in their sudden twinkling flash.

Now nothing streaks, and if it did,
he could not see it well enough to know
though once he’d flown the long transit
from Britain to the angry Reich,
and made it back each time—

each time, come home, landing with
the whole plane shaking, bouncing.
After every trip they’d paint a bomb
along the nose, so anyone could count
the time and distance back to life.

Well, this is life, what’s left.
He makes a different transit now,
almost weekly, from skilled nursing to
intensive care, and back again
when nurses see his signs improve.

Back then, longing for the final mission,
he’d feared to think of anything
that he could call a home—lived instead
for moments of pure sensation,

a taste on the tongue or light filtering
across the curve of an exhausted eye—
lived only for each slight impression,
as if his mind had become a gallery
hung with frozen moments of his life.

Now he wants to cease these missions too,
and, closing his eyes, thinks that time
should finally grant release, send him home—
but no, not yet, and so he blinks awake
and steels himself to hear his anxious breath,
faint in the tightening mask.

Word Lady

(for the speech therapist)

She coaxes him from silence,
teaching the awkward tongue
the slow walk through
halting motion
and half-formed sound.

He sees the bright color
and warm light
that morning by morning
welcomes him
to the small room
where she keeps the words.

He watches her eyes, first,
and then her lips,
but they move so fast,
like a small bird he saw once
that hovered by the bud
of a dark red rose.

He says “bud” but means
instead the bird, means
really the winged words
he cannot seem to catch,
so he picked some petals
and brought one to her.

“OO” she had said,
and he thinks of that today,
as they work with the “oo,”
the round sound he cannot say,
so that “moon” becomes “mun”
and “soon” becomes “sun.”

That night, in a dream, he watches
his tongue become a bird
that sings and dances in the air,
circling the Word Lady
until she smiles and laughs.

Vincent Casaregola teaches American literature and film, creative writing, rhetorical studies, and composition. He has published poetry in a number of journals, including The Bellevue Review, The Examined Life, Natural Bridge, WLA, Dappled Things, 2River, Work, Lifelines, and Blood and Thunder. He has also published creative nonfiction and flash fiction.