“Under tactical conditions, the operational element
is completely rigged at the point of no return.”
U.S. Army Field Manual 31-19

My father spent a considerable period of his youth
falling from the sky.

He set fire to objects, a behavior he passed on,
downward. He has said to me "I didn't start the fire."
But that may have been rhetorical. Lyrical.

Some people build houses and some people burn them down.
Some people build the objects that burn down the houses. Those people are
in between, maybe, or at a right angle, their axis begetting
a spatial dimension through which to drop like an iron bomb.

The longer one falls, the faster, to a point. That is, one falls to a point,
as my father fell.

On average, men spend far less time falling than my father.
Our understandings of the verb to plummet are only superficially similar.

My mother waited, gravid, while he dove through the night's long dive, literally
a falling man, primed as he was, the fields alight with flares, a streaking mass,
the angel’s plunge, an altitude’s perishing, the fire, the dagger, the halo.