Routine Assignment

In memory of Captain Milburn G. Apt, who died in the X-2, Bell's rocket

research plane, in September of 1956, on his first flight. This test pilot was known

as "a quietly amiable man who liked nothing better than puttering in his garden

and playing with his kids".

To pass inhuman barriers

heroes were by ancient ritual

brought most bloody forth from loins ripped wide

in bestial labor; they sprung from childhood

marked for joy and fell in virgin manhood

on divine traps: strange deaths stained their pride

with glory grim yet natural

to men lacking man's terrors.

Leave them in myth where they lie,

destroyers of all decency,

brave but in excess-as if God's wilds

were gardened rich without domestic tools,

or flesh home enough-who today is fooled

past what tested powers prudence wields?

No man knowing love leaves men, he

fears that hero's wish to die.

Icarus, that callow youth,

that amateur doomed in contempt

of the laws of motion, comes to mind:

beeswax and feathers ruined by the sun

to adorn some moral that kept Greek sons

down on the farm, on foot, with their kind-

are heavens heaven when attempts

on heights reach but to such truth?

Captain Apt: no hero found

in legend falls with such a fall,

bound unwarned, unwilling, unmade for death,

professionally cautious every day,

a family man needing his week's pay

though working beyond life's reach where breath

takes thought, where his something is all,

and nothing's silence surrounds.

Those who came back from such flight

do not talk with heroes' accents

of what they know-Chuck Yeager the bold,

aging Gene May, restless Bill Bridgeman, and

one who broke through first and died, de Havilland-

that tremorless high arc, still and cold,

Mach 3 on twenty-mile ascents,

that peace of most intense light,

or that flameout, at the top,

weightlessness, shadow-blotched dials,

null trim control, that long loathed drop down,

buffeting, burning, shattering through air,

plunged worse than the damned falling in despair,

that deadstick landing on native ground,

that fearful gearing for new trials:

a day's work that never stops.

POBTRY

Such means mean ends: you perished

in the name of power and life,

on routine assignment, testing walls

of shock, of heat, testing blood bone and metal,

force on naked force, that we may settle

squatter's claims on God's desert which calls

the soul as man is called to wife-

that children may be cherished

amid universal storms,

that cabins may grow to towers,

tribes to nations rampant who shall find

solace paving boulevards of empire

which run past all barriers to desire

and plant on barren worlds the strong mind

that loves love's domestic powers,

love's homemaking human forms.