The Blue Angels

Have you heard the sound of them

during Fleet Week the threat of our brute

aerial power flaying whole afternoons

in formation and turgid fumes over the Bay

my friend at the Chron says they fly

700 mph and 18 inches apart

skimming the filigree of a sound barrier

until they bang through fog

like a truncheon hitting a skull I first heard

them as a young man newly-arrived

in SF and immediately thought

more towers were about to fall

bombs whistling down bridge cables

snapped and yet another date

enshrined with our national fear

I ducked my head and turtled into

a knitting store on Cortland where

there were actual little old ladies

of all stripes listening to NPR

their needles a blur inside the scent

of green tea I know this sounds

like revisionist history but that was the day

I decided to find my own angel

investor and then control the blue skies

from above America go higher even

than those pilots careening

mechanized maws of death

in still concentrating bodies

wondering did those men and women

trained to bomb know that truth

is the apprehension of the absolute

condition of present things

were they able to sniff or blink

in cockpits our nation’s beauty

birds edging over the harbor’s white froth

I never felt so foreign and human

in the old ladies’ company

knowing I was pinned between

two kinds of ethos our love

of emancipation and ongoing slavery

and in the end the ladies graciously

calmed me with gossip

and a mug of steamed darjeeling.

The Spirituals App

I just got back from this great show

in which I was an interloper

a Jackaloper at what used to be known

as a nightclub the whole feel

of the place as dark as the earth’s shadow

something users used to see

in eons older a real bar with fluorescent

drinks and lots of characters

trending in blunt acoustics

when a young guy not unlike

one of our interns arrived

with keyboards guitars drums amps

there were two guys actually

and I watched and listened as they

instigated a rhythm with pluck and brush

It’s the spirituals the barkeep

said and I didn’t know if he

was talking about this two-man band

or the music they were pretending

to play which sounded like

a blend of soul and rock and jazz

and I listened for a while studied

especially the guardian architecture

of their hands on their instruments

all the feedback they manicured

was it music or just sound

and here’s the brilliant part

that rattled the vast loose agenda

of my ego they never once looked

at their audience these Spirituals

all two of them peered down

at their instruments as if

in humility they were not playing

for us but for themselves

and I decided right then and there

we have to build an algorithm

based on their incomplete

yet strangely optimized schemes

that seemed to argue randomness

is best when it’s intrinsic

I could tell during their set

they’d plunged their minds into a kind

of reverie not the single pulse

of dopamine pleasure

with which we’ve made a mint

but the most important feature

of the set was that it began at all

and though it went on all night

perhaps forever it ended for me

when it welled up a memory

of my father with a switch hovering

nearby while I practiced

my notes while I was trying

at nine years old to learn the horn.

David Roderick has published two poetry collections, Blue Colonial and The Americans, and his work has been recognized with a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, the Amy Lowell Traveling Scholarship, and an NEA. He serves as the Director of Content for The Adroit Journal. In Berkeley, California, where he lives with his wife and two daughters, he directs Left Margin LIT, a creative writing center and workspace for writers.