Catherine Anderson | Invention of the Helicopter | Poets Resist

Born in Detroit, the daughter of a school teacher and a newspaper reporter, Catherine Anderson has published four full-length collections of poetry as well as numerous essays. Her newest full-length collection is Everyone I Love Immortal, with Woodley Memorial Press. Previous works include Woman with a Gambling Mania (Mayapple Press), The Work of Hands and In the Mother Tongue. Poems have appeared in the Dunes Review, bosque, the I-70 Review, and other journals. Forthcoming this summer will be a poem in the Southern Humanities Review as a finalist for the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize. She now lives in Kansas City where she works with new interpreters from the city’s immigrant communities.

Also by Catherine Anderson: In the Mother Tongue The Work of Hands Womanhood

Poets Resist
Edited by Jemshed Khan
May 22, 2019

Catherine Anderson

Invention of the Helicopter

That couple in the intersection after the wreck — a man holding a woman in tight embrace, who would go up to them and circle their arms around that sorrow, ambulance lights swirling in the black air heavy with sirens and the scent of burned plastic. A kind of peace I’d give for those two, whether they want, in their moment, thoughts like these or not. Now a police helicopter hovers, the blades a panic-attack sweep as it lands the way its inventor designed — straight down, bull’s eye, like a hummingbird approaching the bounty of a flower, having evolved with such slow motion to blend with the mirror-red-blue-green of what surrounds it. The hummingbird lights on the hibiscus blooming in July, lights like a verb of being — a copula reflecting its own origin: the hummingbird is the nectar-rich world. And the helicopter, a steel-bullet body of gray-and-brown-spotted camouflage, the military hue a man sees every day waking up, sliding into his truck for work, the regiment color he’s known since boyhood, lining up his soldiers, the pattern of his T-shirts, the choice for things like a stapler, a backpack, all this a copula, too, for a helicopter in camouflage equals the danger of the world, the reminder of a lifetime — little boy, bazooka raised toward the sky in his calendar of dreams, eyes closed. Or open. Like the man they told him he should be, he walks out of the dream and into ambush, or guns, a burning car in July. And the woman there on the street with him — she knows the silhouette, the pattern of grief. When the colors of camouflage spread and devour all they touch, here is my wish: a woman and a man are prepared for the injury, the hurt. Each holds the other in full embrace. And if another pair of arms comes circling out of chaos, they will not move, not dodge the imagined copula connecting them to another person.