Steady Vernon, Radio Operator and Gunner
Rodney Torreson
getting a read on the sky
beneath striations of the moon, soared
with lightning. His plane—wherever it flew—
was like a flying fence expanding
the U.S. border into Germany.
To his credit in ‘44, thirty-one cloud-slammed
missions for a plane ripping apart the wind.
One day his B17 and thirteen others
headed out where German fighters poured
unseen from the sun. In the evening
only his and three others returned
from scolding black smoke
and white cloud canyons.
That night when Vernon stepped
into the barracks, they’d been wiped clean
of the missing men. In a stare down
with the barracks—the barracks won. “The lowest
part of my life,” he would write.
The next day flying under the clouds,
his plane picking up the tedium of the trees,
the bounce of boughs, he flew where alfalfa
fields scuffed along, over barns where farmers
might have dived on them with pitchforks.
His plane took flak above the sky’s burrowing
baseline—a direct hit on one engine prop.
Part of it spliced through the radio room,
and if he’d not been standing up,
would have gone through Vernon.
Until the plane was feathered,
gunfire nearly shook it into pulp.
Another day, his plane climbing the sky,
he felt almost in rotation with the planets,
when suddenly a B17 flew even.
“The recently captured plane,” Vernon assessed.
then knuckled down, braced himself,
was about to take it out when from nowhere
a voice boomed, “You have no proof.”
Vernon forced his right hand to his side
so he wouldn’t fire a farewell.
Later, marked by an Air Medal with a 3 oak-leaf cluster,
a Distinguished Flying Cross and battle fatigue,
he was assigned to a military complex near Spokane.
Nothing to do there but ride horses
through the earth’s reign of loneliness,
where he painted his misery, dead
to all pleasure. He knew he was well
when he volunteered to care for the horses
and clean the barns far below
the turbulence where wild horses of the sky
reared up and bucked.
The poet laureate of Grand Rapids, Michigan from 2007-2010, Rodney Torreson’s fourth full-length collection of poetry, The Ascension of Sandy’s Drive-In, was issued by Kelsay Press in 2023. In addition, Torreson’s recent poems have appeared in American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Paterson Literary Review, Tar River Poetry, and Third Coast.
ISSUED 