Poetry from The Literary Review
The Impossible
Gary Fincke
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College down to its final semester, It was, I vowed, my last winter of walking In terrible weather. The mornings I slogged Through snow, I thought I could see myself In the near future of beating the draft, Shuffling from the physical with the joy Of a small, but unacceptable flaw. In Florida, where I planned to be, Three astronauts were killed on the ground, Inhaling the toxic smoke of a flash fire, Their deaths grafting them to my classmate Crushed by a jeep in basic training, All the danger of the war months away. That weekend, stopped by sirens, I learned A girl who had said goodbye to me Had died in the car she’d chosen thirteen miles Before, that whatever else she’d meant To say had been hurled through a windshield. Like she could have been, I was riding With Cecil Moyer, who was going To explode in the air over Vietnam, But right then, just after 2 a.m., we shared The expletives that follow sudden death. Added the sentences full of “if,” The paragraphs stuffed with stories meant as Consolations for what seemed impossible— To die so fast surrounded by rescue. On the news, January shutting down, Were tributes to Grissom, Chaffee, and White. February filled with fault speculations About frayed wires, oxygen level, the hatch Too difficult to reach, and I told myself I wanted to hear what that sophomore, The driver, had to say about speed and ice And drinking because even I had known Enough to rely on the judgment Of Cecil Moyer the way I relied On somebody every night when what I wanted was more than two miles from school, Riding in five cars a week, half of them Driven by soldiers-to-be, without Saying a word about the test flights We were taking to decide what was worth it, What was not, turning up the radio So impossibly loud a siren Couldn’t slow any of us who believed We were learning quickly enough to live. |
