[New-Poetry] The Triggering Town by Richard Hugo

[Anny Ballardini]

I cannot remember who suggest this book on this list, an excellent reading, thank you. I exerted the following:

Tretitoli, Where the Bomb Group Was

 

Windy hunks of light, no prop wash, bend

the green grain no one tried to grow

twenty years ago. Two nuns run a school

where flyers cursed the endless marmalade

and Spam, or choked their powdered eggs

down throats Ploesti tightened in their dreams.

Always phlegm before the engines warmed

and always the private gesture of luck-

touching a bomb, saying the name of a face 

spun in without a sound at Odertol.

 

Hope to win a war gets thin when nuns

pour strega in a room where dirty songs

about the chaplain booked. Recent land reform

gave dirt to the forlorn. That new farm

stands where I would stand in the afternoon

alone and stare across those unfarmed miles

and plan to walk them to the yellow town

away from war, disguised in shepherd black.

That pumphouse hid three whores for weeks

until disease began to show.

 

Now, no roar. No one sweats the sky out

late in day. No trace of squadron huts

and stone block walls supporting tents.

Those grim jokes. The missions flown

counted on the plane in cartoon bombs.

Always wide awake toward the end

when the man came saying time to fly, 

awake from dreams complete with mobs,

thick clubs and slamming syllables of hun

I couldn't understand, trapped behind

cracked glass somewhere deep in Munich

I had never seen, waiting for their teeth

to snip me from the drunken songs of men.

 

We drive off. Children wait for class.

Grain is pale where truck pools were,

parked planes leaked oil or bombs were piled.

The runway's just a guess. I'd say, there.

Beyond the pumphouse and restricted whores

where nuns and shepherds try to soar by running,

arms stuck out for wings against the air,

and wind is lit in squadrons by the grain.

 

[.]

Our losses were terrible. The wing must have lost at least 30 percent, the highest we suffered that late in the war. And no publicity because it happened on December 17, 1944, the same day the Battle fo the Bulge began.

 

[.]

I remembered that only a day or two after we arrived we were called to a meeting of officers in squadron headquarters where we heard the squadron commander deliver an incoherent speech about formation flying. He ended this chaotic diatribe by assuring us that he was a good guy and if any fo us would just have a drink with him we'd realize just how good a guy he was. A week later he was sent home, a mental casualty of the war. 

 

[.]

All flying was voluntary. You could quit whenever you wanted and all you lost was your flight pay. We didn't quit because of social pressure, fear of what others would think, and the fear of ending up in the combat ground forces, although that was a remote possibility. 

 

April in Cerignola

 

This is Puglia and cruel. The sun is mean

all summer and the tramontana

whips the feeble four months into March.

It was far too tense. Off the streets by five.

Flyers screaming begging children off

and flyers stabbed. The only beauty 

is the iron grillwork, and neither that 

nor spring was here when I was young.

 

It used to be my town. The closest one

for bomb-bomb boys to buy spumante in.

it reeked like all the towns. Italian men

were gone. The women locked themselves in dark

behind the walls, the bullet holes patched now.

Dogs could sense the madness and went mute.

The streets were mute despite the cry

of children: give me a cigarette. But always flat-

the land in all directions and the time.

 

I was desolate, too, and so survived.

I had a secret wish, to bring much food

and feed you through the war. I wished

you also dead. All roads lead to none.

You're too far from the Adriatic

to get good wind. Harsh heat and roaring cold

are built in like abandonment each year.

And every day, these mean streets open

knowing there's no money and no fun.

 

So why return? You tell me I'm the only one

came back, and you're amazed

I haven't seen Milan. I came in August

and went home in March, with no chance

in experience the miles of tall grain

jittering in wind, the olive trees

alive from recent rain. You're still my town.

The men returned. The women opened doors.

The hungry lived and grew, had children 

they can feed. Most of all, the streets are wide,

lead nowhere, and dying in your weather

takes a lifetime of surviving last year's war. 

 

from The Triggering Town

Richard Hugo
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