I Wish I Had a Heart Like Yours, Walt Whitman

VIA NEGATIVA

VIA NEGATIVA in memory of my uncle, Peter Roesch James, Mosquito VI navigator and gunner, 45 Squadron RAF. Killed in Burma, 28 February 1945. 1 The way a sudden break in a song makes the song more apparent. I came to know you only as the things you were not. Not a single tooth, said my mother; not a button. Not a button, not a tooth, not a bolt, not a bootlace. Not a goggle lens, a dial glass, a whisper of oil. Not a single slug of rubber. Not even a rumour of fuselage or bone. We each came to believe the story we needed to believe, and this is how it was that we let you die several different deaths at once even though you were given only one. 2 The official report on your death arrived—the details assuaging, perhaps, the need for a body. Sometimes, 27 VIA NEGATIVA when the living can endure their losses no longer, words can do this: sometimes words stand in for the world. You are not light walking the curve of your own spillage; you are not foliage, not smoke, not flame, not a green so complete it tasted vicious. Not static on the wireless, cutting out. Not vomit or blood or the dive your pilot could not pull out of. You are not even the sound of your own voice crying out. Not even the loss of that sound. Not the gutter of your own throat flushed with rain. You are only an absence obligating me to make certain that the life I have be enough. And the hope I have carried, always, is for some last thing of which I am not yet aware, through which you will at last step forward. Because what use am I to you, little god of negatives, if you will not finally appear? It is time. 3 October. Among the robins flocking in the marsh it seems there is always one who insists on breaking into the stashed, bone box of his spring repertoire 28 to sing in protest against his own departure. Even when his song is lost behind the static of a world intercepted by rain, it is there. I feel it. Long, braided straps of song. It is time. 4 There was a lover. And you were thinking of her and her white dress. Of her and her white dress. Of her white dress and the parachute you didn’t have the height or the time to use; of her white dress as it lifted and filled and held you against the drop. There was a lover. And she always remembered you as that one, unrepeatable moment when getting dressed once after love the light, efficient and sophisticated, licked up the short run of your fly as the teeth of its zipper locked back together. 29 ...