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.