The Screaming Eagle’s Daughter Laments & Me and Your Shadows
by Kate Falvey
The Screaming Eagle’s Daughter Laments
There are children born with your name
that you left too soon to know.
There are children you knew but did not know
because how could you, swifted from your
D-Day jump into some sales job and the arms of
a sweetie of a sinless wife who baked you pound cakes,
pressed your hankies, and stilled your nerves
imperfectly with unfamiliar loyalty and love?
Understanding took more time than we had
together, you hustling your charm out the kitchen door
each night, trailing a forcefield of need and
jittery intentions like the haze of a lost cause.
There were always the thrums of the be-good-to-your-
mother ritual kisses brisked on the tousle of heads
paused before the lamb chops or meat loaf you couldn’t
share, your eventual job tending bar meaning you slept
all day and worked all night so missed the orange crayon
on the wall, the sauce-and-stew-pot forts clanging,
the shards of paste snipped from troubled hair, the
pipe cleaner faces twisted into scatty puppet shows.
I played dolls with your medals and pins,
sorting stars and purple hearts into burnished or
faceted families, laying baby wings into a cardboard
cradle, blanketed with a screaming eagle patch.
The eagle rightly scared me with its snapping beak
and snaky tongue, head severed from its flight.
I didn’t know then why its fierceness looked forlorn,
or why a scruffy kind of pride seemed fissured in its
dreadful, distant, agitated seeing, why its roughness
seemed if not a sham, then at least an unconvincing
camouflage for something it kept close and wouldn’t
share. I always wondered what it was looking at or for
and why it couldn’t lift its death-defying wings
and brave the earnest impact of the ordinary air.
Me and Your Shadows
I.
I don’t think you were my hero
or if I had a notion of what that even meant.
You made magic, vanished a stuffed dog with bells
in its ears and two sloe-eyed raggy purple tabbies
from your blue pajama lap to the far away
window side of our Queens living room.
You must have sung all those old familiar tunes
or how would I know them all?
There is a snapshot of me in an oversized striped
jacket, holding on a straw boater as I dance
on the big red brocade couch. I was surely
singing Me and My Shadow, imitating your
suave soft-shoe and Irish tenor croon. I doubt
the hat and jacket meant you sang barbershop
with some guys from the bar but who knows what
you got up to when not in your brown easy chair
with me patting your unshaven morning chin saying
rough, Daddy, rough, and you saying you weren’t
sleeping, sweetheart, but just resting your eyes.
II.
So when your drinking crashed into
a neighbor’s car and the local newspaper
I was enlisted to fix the broken headlights
in our home, trust totaled,
seemingly beyond repair,
no road forward showing.
Desperation called me to active duty,
when I was too young to effectively serve,
though brash with indignation and
rudimentary resolve. We sat at the early
evening kitchen table, coffee on the marbled
formica, awkward with shared shame.
You never talked about your exploits
in the war. A few iconic stories explained
your medals and your youth: ducking to
pick up a puppy in a field under fire,
bullets whacking the air above your crouch;
plaster from a farmhouse blasted into your eyes,
your eyelashes plucked to minimize infection;
swimming a boat across a river;
your lung collapsing;
landing in the brig and only losing
your little rank – something about decking
a bully officer, something about
being a grudging acting sergeant
after that; the clickers not clicking
after landing in Normandy; saving someone.
The theme was always luck,
not heroizing thrills. You quashed the notion
of any kind of bravery but before I was myself
well beyond eighteen, I couldn’t know how shaky
eighteen is, how green, how staggeringly young.
So when I gently broached your terrifying drinking
you surprised me into stories of your war, the old
faithfuls, to be sure, the ones I knew, but more
of your confusions, questions, terrors, ghosts
than I’d ever known before. Snow deeper than
whatever boots were had in the Ardennes, the pine
and birch howling spikes of bitter winter
as you trudged and huddled and pushed
into frigid compliance, blood steaming
in a landscape of blasted skulls and limbs.
I held your hand as you talked into the safety
of the coming dark, in the sunny kitchen
you sipped your sweetened morning coffee in,
with the daughter you were sure would be
a victor in whatever fields she fought in,
whiskey coursing through memory like
the saddest river in the saddest song
pulsing in a jagged throat which struggles
to swig blasts of unforgiving air.
III.
Here’s my definition of an Irishman:
You have a fear of heights and you
volunteer to jump out of planes.
Under enemy fire was the clincher to this,
my standard joke, a sort of punchline
to underscore the crazy.
My lanky father, skittish on the high dive at
the Lake George public beach. I was burdened
and exposed in my pre-teen flirt of ruffled dotted
two-piece, on the last low-rent family get-away
I’d ever deign to join. He startled me by swaying,
quipping about the long way down then leaping –
pounding gamely into the cold drum of the lake.
I still can feel the spikes of the mortified splash
when I quake in free-fall
with pent bravado
and try to flout my own
relentless and ignoble fears.
Kate Falvey’s work has been widely published in an eclectic array of journals and anthologies, a full-length collection, The Language of Little Girls (David Robert Books), and in two chapbooks, What the Sea Washes Up (Dancing Girl Press) and Morning Constitutional in Sunhat and Bolero (Green Fuse Poetic Arts). She co-founded and edited the 2 Bridges Review, published through City Tech (City University of New York) where she teaches, and is an associate editor for the Bellevue Literary Review.
Falvey writes, “I played with my father’s purple hearts and bronze stars as a child, enjoying the snap of the box lids, the textures of metal and cloth. There was nothing puffed up about my father. He never boasted of exploits or heroism. If anything, valor was minimized and talk about what happened in his war was virtually nonexistent. Bits and pieces were revealed through the years, and I supplemented with research about the campaigns he participated in as a member of the 101st Airborne Division, 506th parachute regiment, Company B. Of course, the tentacles of the trauma—not much acknowledged with WWII vets—were omnipresent and insidious.”