The book is real. His notes sketched into margins, equal signs and question marks. But what I take out of this book isn’t what the technical writers put into it. I don’t think like a pilot thinks. When I see that there are two main kinds of drag, I assume we’re speaking metaphorically.

So Manual of Flight is a symbolic book to me. An educational work, a foreign text, for sure, but as much about personal momentum as airspeed, and more about drag than drag. The only way I know how to communicate that is to change the context of the words until they’re weird for you, too. I hope.

This is the final poem in this series.

Parasite Drag

Reduced pressure equals increased lift.
Parasite drag increases with airspeed.

Work your empennage.
Work your elevators.

Positive static is stability tending
toward your original equilibrium.

Negative static? The ball’s displaced
and moving farther from equilibrium.

You yaw in the direction of the lowered aileron.
Call it adverse yaw. Call it.

To measure your true course, center
over an intersection.

The course line crosses the azimuth in
the direction of flight.

Increase your airspeed and the parasite
drag increases, too.

I say again: negative, out, over.
Read back.

Roger. Say again. Speak slower.
Stand by.

That is correct: verify.
Check with originator.

© 2009 Will Hindmarch

From a series of found poems drawn from my father’s copy of Cessna’s Manual of Flight.

The wind side of the computer
determines the altitude which results
in the highest groundspeed, as they say.

This is accomplished
by comparing the winds
aloft with the course.

The wind forecasts each altitude
on the rotating azimuth
like a groundspeed/true heading problem.

The true heading problem — the difference
is that more than one wind is plotted
and each wind dot is identified.

The plotter portion of the sliding grid is used
to measure true course. You can think
of it as a device that measures directions.

The following instructions explain
how to determine your true course.

© 2009 Will Hindmarch

This is part of a series of found poems drawn from the Cessna Manual of Flight, which I got from my father.

Once you establish the bank, relax.
The pressure on the ailerons and rudder
pedals? Neutralize them.

Not all of the lift is available
to overcome weight.
You’ll tend to descend.

It’s a shallow spiral.

Roll out
before the desired heading
or you’ll overshoot.

—

© 2009 Will Hindmarch.

This is the second found poem in a series from my dad’s old copy of Cessna’s Manual of Flight.

This increases drag.
This decreases airspeed.
Steeper turns you must add,
power to overcome,
the drag.

Or you’re faced with the choice:
lose altitude or airspeed after you
roll out, of your turn,
reset power
for cruise
so you can fly
hands off.

© 2009 Will Hindmarch

(So I found this Cessna pilot’s guide, called Manual of Flight, in with my father’s books. The thing is full of found-poetry fodder. One of the best reactions I’ve ever gotten to a poem came from an early version of this one, which I’ve just rewritten after losing the original years ago. All this week, I’m composing found poems from this Manual of Flight.)

“Why is that?”

“I’ll tell you,” he says with that used-car-salesman tone that implies the word if is on its way. “But,” dammit, “you can’t tell Hodge I told you.”

“Okay,” I say. No point in telling him Hodge was dragged to death behind a very-much-earthbound car yesterday.

“Okay. Here it is: flying cars are easy sells because nothing ever goes wrong with them. Absolutely no practical downside to owning one of them.” He smiles, all upper teeth. “Dream come true.”

“Except. For the, you know,” I let it hang there for a second, but he doesn’t see it, “fact it’s not true.” He squinted and shrugged, then went for his coffee. “The part where they don’t exist.”

He slurped off the top of his mug. Under the table, I push the recorder closer to him. “Well, like it says on the brochure, we sold a dream. An experience.”

“No,” I correct him, finger pointing up between us, “you told them they could take these cars home.”

“And McDonald’s tells people that a clown loves them.”

“How can you say that?” the Doctor asks. Behind his glasses his eyes are red and swollen.

“I cannot”—the cylinders catch and hiccup—”love, love you.” The Doctor reached out to her with his good hand and brushed her porcelain face. “I cannot—not, not—love you,” she said again.

Mortimer spoke up. “I’m sorry, Doctor.” He pulled a phonographic record, black and grooved, from the front of his apron. “Do you want try number 221?”

The Doctor put his plush-and-fabric hand to his eyes, scrubbed away tears. “I don’t know how many more of these I can handle today,” he said, taking the record and swapping it with the one on the back of her brass skull. He cranked up her insides, like the weights inside a grandfather clock, and fitted the needle against the new record.

“Good morning, my dear,” he said.

“Good morning, my love.”

“And you still want to keep it?” Kendal’s got him by the wrist joint, one foot on his thigh, and she’s pulling.

“That’s not,” his voice breaks into a shriek as his elbow port disconnects, “funny!” He’s panting. Something drips out of the joint. A bit of conductor fluid, a dab of blood.

“The worm’s in your wrist now, for sure. You’re about ten seconds from losing your shoulder. You want I should wait?”

“No,” he says. “Yes. Wait.” He looks at the ceiling. Yellow tiles, used to be white. He swore he’d never let her do this again. He smells the electric burn of his elbow grinding itself, out of place. If the virus gets into his myokinetic interface, into the flat ribbons under his shoulder muscles, leading to his spine, it could mess with the signals that run from brain to arm in a game of bioelectric telephone. Permanent damage.

And yet.

“Don’t do it,” he says. Almost crying.

“Screw that,” Kendal says, leaning back into it, pushing off his thigh until his arm’s off its threads.

Not long ago, my parents gave me a copy of the issue with this in it, which they’d apparently been holding onto. This poem is now almost as old as I was when I wrote it.

Just now, I went back to read it again, because Wood’s got me thinking of taking up some poetry again (Haiku Year notwithstanding). I include this thing here at Jet Pack as an excerpt of myself, I guess. I’ve resisted the urge to revise the language or spelling.

June 17th, 1994, 10:38:09 p.m.

I was on my way home,
tapping behind 49th Ave.,
prepped for a night of sit-com
boredom and empty phones,
when, or perhaps a moment before,
a pair of grim-clad stereotypes emerged
as though they had been poured
out of a thick fluid from some economy-buy jug,
out of the cardboard, shadow, and crate walls
of one’s junior-high impressions of New York.

One clicked out a ditty
he’d been working on all morning
as the taller one demanded,
with knife in hand and his army of playground strategy,
that I “fork over some green,”
and “quick buddy.”
Actually, it was a switchblade
or more of a butterfly,
like a bayou sidearm or bucknife, bayonet.
When I say bayonet
I mean saber, katana,
six feet of wood with a spear’s head,
a pole-arm or wickedly toothed halberd.
A Tomcat or F-15 Eagle
with ICBM emplacements,
except more like an orbital defense platform
capable of smoking Chicago
and me
if I didn’t produce some bread,
which I did.

Art © Ray Fawkes

Ray Fawkes (The Apocalipstix, Mnemovore) is a cunning writer, fearsome with a pen in hand, but he’s about to go too far. He’s taking that pen of his and he’s drawing pictures with it. Writers should do that, for sure, but Ray is drawing and painting actual pictures, and he’s getting better at it with each passing day. It makes me afraid. Soon there will be no stopping him.

If you haven’t yet, take in Ray’s story, “Black Strings,” and his gallery at Tor.com, and then come back here.

This week, Rays taking part in the ROTOR-style project called 5 Lights, which in itself didn’t surprise me. But he’s not in there as a writer, which did surprise me. (Meaghan O’Connell’s the writer this time out, and her new piece “Muscles Better and Nerves More” will make you hurt, it’s so good.)

Ray’s art is gorgeous, but he was so ingrained in my head as a writer that this revelation that he could work brushes as well as he could pens sort of threw me down. Then it raised the bar up over its head and said, “I make my own pictures, bitch.” I was an illustration major for a while — I know enough to appreciate how hard it is to do well.

So I did what I do when I see something new: I questioned it. Here are my five questions and Ray’s five answers.

Will Hindmarch: Tell me a little bit more about 5 Lights and what you’re doing there.

Ray Fawkes: 5 Lights is a collaborative art project, bringing five artists together each month and setting them loose on four themes, allowing them to riff, jazz-improv style, around those themes. Photography, illustration, music, the written word, and video are the disciplines; the media and content are nearly unlimited.

I’m the featured illustrator this month, working watercolors as my instrument of choice. Every image I’ve created for the project is brand new, and will be unveiling to the public for the first time on the 5 Lights site.

You’re a proven writer, across a bunch of textual mediums, and you told me you were a little surprised to be invited to 5 Lights as an illustrator. Do you think of yourself as an illustrator yet?

Heh. I do, yeah — but I’m still surprised about it. I’ve been painting and drawing relatively quietly for some time, letting my writing take the front seat in my career. Recently, though, my artwork has started creeping up from the back seat, and, thanks to the encouragement of some good friends and compatriots, I’ve decided to start showing  it publicly. So it’s not so much that I don’t think of myself as an illustrator — it’s that I’m still pleasantly surprised to find that other people do.

How does your experience as a writer inform your illustration?

It feeds it, in an oblique way. The urge to tell a story and the tendency to symbolism in my prose both seem to bleed into my deliberations when I put pencil to paper. I find myself constructing a sort of foundational story to each image as I work, and hints of that story tend to show up in the finished piece.

You seem to be focusing on analog materials for your art — watercolors and ink. Why’s that?

It’s all analog for me. I’ll do some digital edits if necessary, but I tend to shy away from them. It’s all got to do with my reasons for painting and drawing — I often do it to take a break from my other work, which is almost always on computer. So the illustration is my “sunlight and open windows” activity, where everything is tactile and silent.

As your illustration work expands and refines, is it changing the way you write?

Mmmaybe? I can’t say for sure. I’ll be doing a hell of a lot of both over the next year, as a couple of as-yet-unannounced projects hit the table, and I might very well find the processes feeding and changing each other. Ask me again in 2010!