This poem, written in 2006, is in Chapter 3: Flora and Fauna of The Immigrant and the Outlaw.
The backstory is that my husband was an air traffic controller. Get a couple of controllers together, or a group of retired ones, and you still hear several of these terms.
The only one I didn’t hear from them was Immelmann. That came from a WWII letter from Danny Wilson, whose transition training and combat was as the pilot of a P-38.
Joyride
Notch-tailed cadets
take turns in the traffic pattern
without benefit of control tower,
sweeping downwind,
shouldering baseleg,
gliding into low approach,
dipping, diving under
a graveled bridge along
Old Creamery Road,
emerging upwind, into
a steep Immelmann turn
against a peach and mauve glow
on a September evening,
chattering and fluttering afresh
into the traffic pattern
of young barn swallows,
dark above a flash of rosy tan,
crosswind, downwind,
for yet another spin.
—–
