Contents
Accidental Crash of an F-4 Phantom
Jungle Environmental Survival Training
Counterfeit War Poem for Martin
USN
So common it passed unnoticed then,
the easy confidence over the salt planet glinting
the natural American supremacy of
Innocents Abroad. So this is what we have
that is new: viewed mostly from foreign shores
the majesty of waves, and there in the immeasurable
distance a cloud where the horizon should lie,
sky and water split only by ships
of the same color, subtly bristled
as insects poised on a translucent membrane
of diesel and plutonium.
Clouds come like galleons.
In summer when the rains came I
heard the booms that might have been the war.
My dad got a job overseas I told
the faded characters some of whom I think
might have become friends had time not
transported us to different arenas.
I did not doubt my role then, as clear
as gold on dark broadcloth.
Now only nothing
seems clearer, how the spark of a wave
translates itself into dress whites or the sun
over the family farm long since sold
to its last inch of dust and the eyes
of those we sometimes still called natives
watching us for our favor or disgust,
as we watched the sea, the changeling tide.
Run Spot, Run
In Yokohama Sister Teresa
taught the boys of Sancta Maria school
their first grade cursive writing and their math.
Half American and half Japanese,
we sat similarly stiff at wooden desks —
seats joined to the desks in back — and day dreamed
about cowboys or our favorite monsters.
Like Kappa, the water sprite: hollow-crowned,
green with weedy hair, the small physique
incredibly strong. Pretending to want
to play, Kappa would drag your clueless soul
flopping like a deckbound fish to his home
in icy country creeks. You couldn=t run,
but if you jarred the water from his head
he=d go limp and offer you one good wish.
There were certain possibilities there,
but mainly fear. And not just in the streets,
as you walked home past ditches and canals,
but even here in class, just thinking about it.
And now Teresa teaches us to read,
her black robes swirling on a hidden draft,
her starched white cowl surrounding pretty lips.
In a kind of awe we turn to Dick and Jane,
leaving behind the fish stalls and tile roofs,
tatami floors, paper walls, bamboo groves
in the suburbs, and honey bucket men
for this: houses set apart on sprawling lawns,
Crayola-colored firemen and cops
protecting happy kids on sterile streets.
So clean, so bright, these charming teachers= lies.
Run Spot, run. Kappa=s coming right behind you.
Lost in Yokohama
My father, younger than I am now,
wears this Hawaiian shirt and khaki pants,
impersonating a civilian, and looms
benevolently over the shopkeepers —
an Elvis among elves, streetcars, fishstalls,
and the sudden blooms of silk kimonos.
I hurry breathless by his knees,
peering over trays of octopus,
grimy origami, gold-capped grins,
and gutters trickling urine through a world
big as the sky from Fuji to the bay
where white-crowned trawlers sail.
In an alley he tells me that tailless dogs
float in the moat of the Imperial Palace
but the Emperor won’t even kill a bug.
“Where’s the base,” I cry, “are we lost?”
Dad laughs. Columbus was another man
who didn’t know where he was.
Victory at Sea, Epilog
The priest thanked us for the Ovaltine, the lady
whose parlor it was joked about other ‘visitors’
meaning the centipedes undulating swiftly across
the carpet, yet when I repeated the mot she frowned
and mother chided me, right there on the ruffled chintz.
It was Asia, after all, and the transplantation
never quite works: see Francis Xavier or our officers
who, when the band in the O Club played as a joke
the old Imperial Navy anthem, and the old
SDF Captain abruptly stood to attention weeping
changed their laughter to applause, not knowing
which was the greater insult. Then the maid said
bombs had fallen not far from our quarters not long ago
and I was so young – I would be so young so long —
I said ‘Cool’ and she must have been afraid
to argue, I guess, which is what it means to win,
especially to boys and nations just waking,
splitting a fine silk cocoon.
Children of the Cold War
We had fan-leafed shrubs in flower beds, lined
with round rocks painted the official white
of an undress tropical uniform,
streets named after Naval Heroes, and green
signs stencilled in classified acronyms.
Nukes filled the bunkers beside the golf course
and dependents’ beach, but I wasn’t scared:
when I was five, father said the Russians
were fifty miles off.
Anyone will dream
about the town they came from and wonder
how the folks are getting on. When I wake,
I know that my friends have rotated out
and the natives have completely outgrown
subservient pidgin.
Classes in Quonsets,
theaters with geckos and mosquitos —
some of my friends swore in five foreign tongues
but under it all spoke the one language
of housing, billets, and tours of duty,
marking each other by their fathers’ ranks
and planning on careers in the same trade
that would bind us forever to the threat.
We hardly knew the country we were from,
and even today when I see the flag
and something like patriotism swells,
I see jungles, pagodas, and bronze seas,
and feel again the twinge of having served
a land that we’d return to as strangers.
EMPIRE
Driving from Clark AFB to USNAVSTA Subic Bay, 1968
Two officers propped up starched white hats,
cool and rough as concrete, the visors shiny.
The mocha chauffeur cornered briskly,
black hair reflecting the shifting lights
of jeepneys and sari-sari stores. Headlights
ignited the puddled streets, then the moon
glowed softly from the flooded paddies.
In Danilupihan, midnight growled
with trucks from Manila, while faces
watched from the crowd to rise in turn
like the drowned of several days. Kids’ faces,
eyes clashing with their smiles,
drifted to the ports of our pale gray van,
offering Juicy Fruit packs like bouquets
islanders offer the rare tramp steamer.
I had only my phrase-book words, precleared
by DoD: “We are friends.” “We come in peace.”
“How many were there?” “How many — Soldiers/
Planes/Trucks/Tanks?” “I must have — Food/Medicine/
Porters/Guides.” “Do not run away.” “Obey or I shoot.”
My first dawn opened on mountains where dew
billowed in clouds from the jungled valleys.
In the west the sun’s early beams made stars
on the rippling plane of the South China Sea.
Birds, loud and garish, ravished the flowers
that had burst like flames by the close-clipped lawns
around prefab quarters and quonset huts.
As the maid brought breakfast, a troop of apes
scaled the chainlink fence to take bananas
from the Navy’s trees, thieving and mating
as we watched from behind our trembling curtains.
In an hour they’d gone, except for one,
who observed us from the fence, eyebrow cocked,
and scratched his chin. Not in wonder,
but something like an old man at the zoo.
The Destroyer Evans
SEATO Manuevers, 1969
One shimmering day well out at sea
the Evans joined a game
of twists and swirls — a kind of dance
for ladies with heroes’ names.
Though she had sailed the South China Sea
and cruised the Sea of Japan,
sailors who slept in her sheet steel womb
called her an old tin can —
till the next typhoon off Kwajelein,
or gale in Puget Sound,
or somewhere else the sea turned mad
and she’s all they had for ground.
Then the Evans’ embrace was sweeter
than a girl’s in Sasebo
or Cam Rahn Bay, or even the lips
of lewd Olongapo.
Today the sailors led the ball;
among them dolphins swam,
amazed at the grace of all the belles
spared from Viet Nam.
The Evans matched a carrier’s step,
in the role of lead escort.
They zigged and zagged, then one of them
stepped starboard instead of port.
Oh I can see the flying fish
take wing at this faux pas,
and shamefaced dolphins diving deep,
who pretend they never saw.
But through the fleet the sailors heard
that rude and sudden noise
of ballerinas tumbling from
the arms of careless boys.
The big Australian carrier,
though dinged, stayed watertight
with bulkheads shut, but the Evans
was lost in fading light.
Searchlights glimmered on the waves
as came the tropic dark;
choppers shuddered the evening haze
but each eye missed the mark.
The Evans’ crew worked by the book,
for their ship and for their lives,
and for the thought of steaming home
to girlfriends, whores, or wives.
But their gray mother holds them now,
five thousand fathom deep.
A colder berth’s not found on earth,
yet there her children sleep.
Accidental Crash of an F-4 Phantom
NAS Cubi Point, 1968
Two suns lit the west, then one, and fragments
of early dusk smoldered on the hillside
overlooking the bay. Aborted armaments
glittered with the spangled waves, and the tide
bore the sirens’ dim, reflexive wailing.
Light ebbed as choppers descended like crows.
Luminous fingers probed the dark scorching
night. The official count of objects rose.
Come morning, dispatches burned like incense
for the families of the pilots: How the two
banked, not hard, but angelically to port.
How they met the unauthorized presence.
How the remaining pieces of tissue
all flew to the Naval Hospital Morgue.
Post 360 Does the Death March
Spring, 1969
Each year the scouts leave base and kick up dust
all eighty klics from Tarlac to Bataan,
like the army that MacArthur left to die
that hot, dry Easter. Passionaras pray
on PA systems screeching through the smell
of every thatched and straggling barrio,
wailing for all the dying Christs in tones
that seep from church to sari-sari store
then wash back where a jukebox plays the Doors.
We march past cardboard huts with roofs of cans
stolen from our trash and put to use; we
point out penitentes in their robes
of purple nylon, real thorns, and crosses borne
like M-60s on marines. We think God
will always have a softer sun for us
than for the flagellantes and their cats
of nine glass-tipped tails. After two days,
sunburned, skinned with dirt, we find the hills.
We see the first battle markers; it’s strange
to hear the old rap of heroes, heatstroke,
and wicked guards with grooved bayonets. Like
we can think of anything now but water
from a tap, a coke, an air-conditioned nap,
and maids to do our laundry. But we sing,
pound our heels, and wave at local girls.
It’s when we see this guy who has no lips
(some Jap interrogator’s joke) we think
of what it might be like to have to stay.
We sort of look away but then he smiles —
maybe on purpose, maybe for effect;
it’s all a God or idiot could say.
And as we pass we leave him cigarettes..
Jungle Environmental Survival Training
Subic Bay, RP 1969
We were young but not all that much younger
than the marines training there. We were just
boy scouts in camouflage, who found it cool
to watch the Negrito staff make a fire
from skillfully-hacked bamboo. They gave us
weirdly helpful advice: which plants to use
for treating snake bites; how rubber sap works
with raw mango for trapping fruit bats; even
how to escape a python (poke his eyes).
.
Then we saw the menagerie: monkeys,
parrots, then at last a concrete pit
holding monitor lizards five feet long,
and most of that jaw. They looked almost tame;
like trophies except for the eyelids, which
at long intervals blinked. A big nothing,
we thought, till someone tossed in rats, who screamed
the way rats can, while still falling. They hit
that inch or two of water and were stunned.
They quickly recovered and began to claw
intently on the unforgiving wall.
The monitors blinked. In less time than that,
they each had their mouthful of dying rat,
and we – the joking high-schoolers – just stood,
stupid with awe. A pair of marines watched,
grinning but not amused. It goes that fast,
they might have said, but didn’t need to now.
Corregidor
It was a place for family picnics then,
its coast artillery frozen in the sun;
when I scaled an eight inch gun, my hands
turned the color of mecurochromed scabs.
We followed a parade of bermuda shorts
back in the bush, where blown out shells
of buildings stared eyeless. We saw mortars
leaning punchdrunk in their concrete grottos
broken by roots but consoled by vines.
I picked up a bolt when dad looked away
and tucked it in my pants. Then the guide said,
here MacArthur promised “I shall return.”
And somewhere else, I guessed, the 26th Cav
sullenly munched their final horse. But there,
on the flip side of home, we were more beleaguered
by boredom and platoons of pretty snakes
caressing rusted relics aimed at sky.
When we finally sailed back, a storm blew in,
whipping up furrows of whitecaps and spray
that hardened into flocks of flying fish.
Maybe the folks were shocked it seemed so old
because headlines never yellow in our minds.
I was fifteen. I rode the rocking waves,
and may as well have walked upon the moon.
Phobia
The white spider covered my hand
and paused, seemingly surprised to find
something warm among the leaf litter.
I’d always been afraid of spiders,
but that night in the jungle, in the rain,
teeth chattering, I could almost laugh
at the irony of freezing, or of finding
comfort in the touch of something live.
It scampered off when the lightning
switched to black, but a thousand lesser
creatures slithered up to stripmine my skin
and make me regret the hunter leaving,
made me believe that in wanting it back
I had somehow conquered a fear.
Fruit Bats at Dusk
Subic Bay, 1970
As the sun slipped from the jungle they woke
and followed to the western edge of sea.
When it flashed in bands of violet and mauve,
they wheeled under stone gray clouds, forming ranks
where the world drops off, and marking files
with lazy fingers stretched as far as yours.
And while the first ones crossed the glowing bay,
aiming for their obscure goal, others still climbed
like secrets in a reticent twilight.
I was halfway down the hill when I stopped
and listened as the darkness whispered
from the sky they mastered to the fading base
of concrete slabs and quonset huts,
where the masts gathered like a winter copse,
and warplanes hunched on the tarmac
like plovers on delicate nests.
Blue lights blinked back to heartbeat sweeps —
a sky completed with graceful gestures,
and the long dimming universe defined
as a trail from Zambales to Bataan, and the void
between our two forevers.
Venereal Disease
U.S. Naval Station, Subic Bay, Republic of the Philippines, 1969
I’ve just turned fifteen. I look at the sea,
and every week of war another ship —
a carrier or a sway-backed LST —
lands sailors or marines for one last clip.
The ocean shines my future on its screen,
and it’s Tropical White, or Jungle Green.
My friends know all about rubbers; it seems
Olongapo was built for one night stands.
They sneak out to town for the local bands
(The Jokers, The In-Crowd, The Soul Supremes),
and watch b-girls do the bottle trick (no hands!)
or grind the caraboa for sticky dreams.
Not me. I’m scared. And a case of VD
or a bust by the local NIS
could scuttle my course to Annapolis,
or even — no shit — NROTC.
And I don’t want to think what I’d do then,
crapped down from Dependent to civilian.
But one day at the Station movie hall
I see grunts and squids being herded in
by a CPO who might have spawned them all.
The lifer pins me with a barstool grin,
says, You, too, little stud. Next time you ball,
this’ll learn you what to stick your yinyang in.
So he winks me by with the kind of leer
you might see a satyr flash at a mirror
before hitting shore for a twelve hour leave.
Which to me is the face of Master Chief God,
the first adult I’ve ever met who thought
I looked old enough to slip on a sleeve.
But the flic’s a joke some thirty years old,
with every dude we’ve seen beside John Wayne
fighting our daddies’ war: a Sweet Young Kid,
a Brooklyn Tough, a Towering Texan,
the Old Captain, and — finally, one change —
an intrepid young Hospital Corpsman.
Scene One: a tin can’s sick bay. Buried deep
in medical reports, the Corpsman frowns,
then hits his boss with news too hot to keep.
Skipper, he submits, our liberty town’s
got a rate of clap that will blow us down:
those harlots will butcher our boys like sheep!
The Old Man laughs but the Corpsman dutifully
pushes condoms while they’re cleaving sea.
It’s a twelve-pack the Texan cooly takes,
but the smartass from Brooklyn only makes
the crack about showering in a raincoat,
while Kid, our virgin, turns gray as the boat.
One reel later they’re cruising scuzzy bars,
chasing ugly sluts we jokingly call
Gonorrhea Gertie, Syphlitic Sal,
and Unspecified Lesion Flo. The tars
sing “Bell Bottomed Trousers” with pelvic thrusts,
then surf upstairs on waves of beer-soaked lust.
Back on the ship it’s maybe the sixth day
before trouble begins, then each of them
unzips his putrid manhood for display.
Doc, they all whisper, I got a problem.
And so do we when we cop a visual
at the ways a dick can turn unusual.
Brooklyn’s no surprise, but how come the Kid?
We all scream when he mumbles his excuse:
She was a nice girl, Doc . . . Oh hopeless squid,
like you could ever land what wasn’t loose!
And then the Texan makes us jump and shout
when he drawls, Well, Doc, Ah ‘spect Ah ran out.
Yet all’s not grins on the Good Ship Chancre,
for now from the slithering depths we see
Hans Conreid’s U-Boat rise like a pecker,
probing for our ship (traditionally ‘she’).
Then views through its periscope take their turns
with our crew in their bunks, groaning It burns!
When Battle Stations sounds they rise alarmed,
and quickly drop their helmets on their toes,
stumble in the gangways, trip over hose,
and send depth charges rolling off unarmed.
Only the Corpsman, who wrapped his roger,
stands between the Navy and disaster.
He blows the unaccountably surfaced sub
out of the water with the forward gun,
saving his charges on the old gray tub,
making the moral and morality one.
But later as I leave the darkened hall
I hear my new-found brothers trash it all.
Most of the squids say the Navy itself
is a rubber, giving security
while you’re being fucked. And even the grunts
wonder why the hell they should guarantee
healthy johnsons for Uncle Sam’s brass cunts
just so’s Victor Charlie can shoot them off.
I nod with the others and say, No shit,
passing, I think, for a young enlistee,
and thinking that, for today at least,
all it takes to be a man is to spit
out a curse when you’re told what’s good for you
and laugh in it’s face, knowing that what’s true
is our asses are there for more than sex
but a whole lot less than undying love,
and that the ships that leave have roomy decks,
and so do the Hueys farting above,
and we’re just fingers on a starched white glove,
or stenciled names on personal effects.
And what that old Chief knows, there by the door,
as he hustles us young studs in and through,
is that we’ll be as ready as any whore
when it’s anyone’s meat that will do.
Hitching in Subic
With six San Miguels and Tanduay rum
we set out from Cubi to Kalayaan,
spent years walking drunk down one midnight road,
then slumped by the only streetlight for miles.
In that one stretch you couldn’t see the ships,
bomb-laden warplanes, or uniformed kids
nervously stalking the liberty port
for any fight that wouldn’t get them killed.
Still, we weren’t alone. Behind, in the glare,
while the gutted Spanish magazine stared
like a blind-drunk squid in Olongapo,
the jungle branches swayed like stoned marines.
And in the hazy globe itself we saw —
so close we could touch them — a thousand bats,
staggered and reeling in plastered orbits,
the Navy’s fireball glowing through their wings.
We laughed as they lurched after flying bugs,
seeming no more hunters than boys in town
to whores in the same light. But in an hour
we dropped the jokes about Sports From Mars
and fixed instead where flights came together
and the resulting fires seared through the night
with reflections from another context,
from the hidden end of the asphalt road.
Because there we saw across the black lanes
that reached the edge of this flickering star,
to depths of evenings thicker than jungle,
and our own dark ride to another shore.
Jungle in the Rain
The boys wearing camouflage tried to joke
while strapping on packs and extra canteens.
The thunder pounded like four-deuce mortars
and the rain barraging the hut=s thatched roof
laid three hundred meters of liquid day
over the slope that led to the bivouac.
There leaves clustered with tendrils — skeins of snakes,
binding tree trunks buttressed with rocket-fin roots.
Dark in the gaps where the branches probed
like skywalks through the alcoved canopy,
the bush rose, gauze-curtained with midday mist,
cloud fingers raking its crown. I imagined
enormous and unreal creatures enthroned
among fragile lattices ten stories up.
Not them, but something still almost human,
who=d study us with the gentle contempt
of gods on Olympus: pale, giant apes
moving to muffled Wagnerian motifs.
Stately and omniscient, their coarse fur drenched
and matted where they=d rested on the bark,
they=d glean birds= eggs, insects, half-rotted fruit,
steeped in the dripping amniotic dank,
and need nothing else, not even the thought
of an end to the rain, a glimpse of sky.
Counterfeit War Poem for Martin
Once or twice, but it felt like a hundred times:
sweat tickling my scalp like a spider and
the sudden thought that the magazine might jam,
leaving me out there bare-assed, a bad comedian
with an audience of Kalashnikovs.
For me the jungle never got that cruel,
though I remember faces I’d sooner forget,
the peculiar smells of burning blood
and rations spilled from split intestines.
Then the joke they told the rest of my tour:
all night on ambush with no shots fired,
but as we rose, silently, to leave,
the kid behind me gasping, then laughing
in relief to gasp again. “Christ,” he explained,
pointing to where I squatted through the night,
“I thought you shit your pants.” The cobra coiled,
missing its source of warmth;
the only thing that missed me over there.
Carillo’s Legs
It still didn’t feel like putting on shoes,
though he only lost the stuff below his knees.
He was this kind of grunt: he barked at his bros
(in the lucid moments, between morphine and pain),
Waste me if I lose anything vital.
That Christmas in our dorm we tried to help
by fixing him up with dates who were blind
in just the right way. The one who made it
stayed on the line when she asked him his height
and he asked back, With, or without, my legs?
His legs — things he strapped on in the morning,
took off in bars, and swung at the cowboys,
kicking them upside the head as they stared.
An ambush as cold as that VC wire
the week some dogface mother iced a monk.
His second week. For his present that year
we gave him a bag of plastic GIs —
charging, shooting, throwing grenades.
Each a regular Sergeant Rock, but clipped
a penny’s width above their little boots.
We laughed. His date was shocked. He killed a wink
and let the lady help him to his room.
Sunrise on the Navy Yard
At o-dark-thirty, dawn’s first light
is always ashen, never blue.
Somewhere an OPNAV directive
laid it down
with avgas and steam
exhaled from yawning vents,
and trumpet calls on concrete slabs
like paint on pockmarked steel.
In the buildings, Admirals
ponder desks and order plaques.
Ensigns say “Out-standing, sir!”
while boldly launching forms.
But I’m an issue-gray civilian here,
that broad river to the sea
floats cups and butts up to my desk,
lays fog outside my door.
And every morning’s winter
under slap happy flags;
down on the oily wharf, the ducks
forget to fly away.
Arlington Cemetery
When a mourner smiles at cherry blossoms,
a mockingbird clutches a slab and sings,
and squirrels drop like jokes from sober trees.
Where backhoed dirt receives the spoiled seed,
soldiers with banners and drums and fifes
attend to their ranks like postcards of war.
When the officer barks and rifles pop
in decorative echoes of battle,
squirrels cry through bared incisors.
And later, when Taps erodes to silence,
the mockingbird raises its head and riffs
on the theme of the last three untimed notes.
Cool white stones parade the livid green:
ensign, sergeant, beloved wife.
Tour buses teem with echoes of life.
Outside, the planes and cars and bikes
glide on, serenely immortal.
Autobiography
Part I, Childhood
I’m four years old and the family moves.
To Japan. By ship. For two weeks
there’s no land. I’m four years old.
My brother tells me there are submarines.
Later in school when they teach me,
I have no problem believing
the earth’s three-quarters saline.
Part II, Adolescence
What’s it all mean?
He grabs me by my shirt
like I could save him from drowning,
looks around the campus, and says,
There’s so much youth here!
It’s true. The streets crawl
with hopeful excited faces
like spiders on an abandoned farm.
Part III, Work
Later some other guy tells me,
in some unbelievably shabby office,
while I’m reading some incredibly dry
Civil Service Commission standards
describing jobs you’d never dream of,
that work itself is fascinating —
the way a waiter puts down a plate
or an accountant totes his numbers even —
anything done with care and skill.
I’m checking the clock while he says this.
Part IV, Art
I take up writing for my soul and see
writers in rooms full of people declaiming
to themselves. Workshops suck me in
like twelve-step programs for sensitive types
who don’t know this is the last place to get laid.
The insular poems and stories rebound
like e-mail in an oyster bed.
Part V, Domestic Life
One day a squirrel falls from a tree.
My wife feeds it and, for the next six years,
we have a pet who’s hell on bookcases.
Has a thing for electric wire and kills my mouse.
But becomes my secret idol, a special muse
whose excursions around my study are for me
an active form of meditation. When she dies,
having convulsions in my hands, I pray to God
before realizing He’s the same son-of-a-bitch
who put us here in the first place and makes life
the eternal joke without a punchline.
Part VI, The Wisdom of Age
That’s really all. What more can you hope for?
Other than what there is on QVC.
The river in all its seasons, maybe.
The punctual catbird returning each May.
The blessing of three or four generations
of dogs with lovesick eyes. Oh Lord,
were it all that easy we’d never know fear,
and every time some driver cut you off,
or boss or lover confirmed the secret truth
of your own inadequacy, then punchline
or no punchline, you really would just laugh.
Chopstick Holders
Brett and I feel too old to be his heirs.
We stand like the staff of an army in retreat,
helping the old man lighten the baggage. He keeps
a gray scrapbook of marines in Korean lairs —
tough kids who grin from their cracking corners.
And he takes a pot for his apartment kitchen,
but not much else leaves his custom mansion
(once the palace of his retirement, and now the court
of a second angry wife). We hurry the work,
throwing relics into impromptu containers.
A lacquered box appears. “This was your mother’s,”
he says, as if we were strangers, then uncovers
and sorts them out in pairs. Japanese ceramics;
subtly tinted flora and fauna. Brett takes the fish,
while I cull radishes, turnips, and leeks.
They were cheap back then, like all our Asian booty —
mahogany knicknacks and ivory statuettes,
six or eight photos of mom by the Taj Mahal.
Now we can only guess at a market value,
or how the distant stone might sum up his regrets.
“Wife of,” it says, just above his name and rank.
Unsteady on his sea legs, our ancient Captain
says, “Just one more thing I got no use for,”
in the same voice that told us of the war
and our own or even the Chinese wounded,
how he patched them up in the snow and got them back
where the doctors sorted living from dead.
Brett and I watch each other as we pack
and wonder how a lonely man’s career
encompassed first a Caesar, then a Lear.
He wants us to keep them. We argue, then give in,
and soon leave, feeling a bit like deserters.
Sometimes a gift’s just taking what’s given.
I really have no use for chopstick holders.
Her Friends Called Her Pat
Again the Saltan casts off for Japan,
a flimsy chance we lean on. Mother waits
with coffee at the Formica table,
cool aluminum legs descending to
a vaguely floral linoleum, browned
lightly around the edges. Behind her,
the oven holds a pan of packaged corn bread
she always cooks too dry. If she just asks,
I could say I’m sorry I still don’t know,
but have one of her unfinished paintings.
There’s always a chance good will come of it.
Someone has to win the lottery, and then
everyone around them becomes nicer,
better looking. She never had this smile
that curls behind a streamer of smoke
falling from heaven to her cigarette –
a paper ribbon we threw overboard
to friends ashore as sailors cast the lines.
When I was four she told me to hold on,
even after it broke, and I obeyed.
Acknowledgements
Amelia, “Hitching in Subic”; ELF, “Sunrise on the Navy Yard”; Folio, “Carillo’s Legs”; Good Foot, “Her Friends Called Her Pat,” “Jungle Environmental Survival Training”; Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, “Chopstick Holders”; Heliotrope, “Run Spot, Run”; Illuminations, “Phobia,” “USN”; Imago (Australia), “Accidental Crash of an F-4 Phantom”; Mandrake Poetry Magazine, “Venereal Disease”; Pearl, “Children of the Cold War”; Pivot, “Corregidor”; Plastic Tower, “Post 360 Does the Death March”; Poetry Ireland, “Arlington Cemetery,” “Autobiography”; Printed Matter (Japan), “Lost in Yokohama”; Rattle, “Empire”; Sonoma Mandala, “The Destroyer Evans”; Takahe (New Zealand), “Fruit Bats at Dusk”; Valley Micropress (New Zealand), “Counterfeit War Poem for Martin”; Waterways, “Victory at Sea, Epilog.”
“Corregidor,” “Fruit Bats at Dusk,” “Lost in Yokohama,” and “Post 360 Does the Death March” also appeared in an earlier volume, The Good Opinion of Squirrels (Word Works and the Washington Writer’s Center, 1996).