We may sometimes think the ones who died are the fortunate ones,
the deputy director of the regional Veteran’s Administration center
said this afternoon, to a small crowd assembled
under blue polyester awnings,
half of which was the volunteer concert band I was in.
The other half I suspected were spouses or perhaps even children
grown middle-aged themselves waiting for their fathers
to come back home from the war
with heart disease, cancer. And the stroke
of three o’clock found us standing in silence
while the local reporters, strangely beautiful and young
literally ran around with cameras to get the wreath-laying
and my friend playing taps into the paper
like they do every year to remember.
In the Details
We played Mahler’s First Symphony tonight
in a civic orchestra sort of way
but it gave aging rich women a place to
go in their wraps and
my mother-in-law sat with my wife and
said she saw horses and did ‘three-legged-dances.’
There are so many moving parts,
I said. The work has defied the best
orchestra’s efforts to play it, and
to play it, not listen to it, is to
count measures of rest after rest
and wait to come in
wait to come in.
The clarinet part is to sound
like a cuckoo and the conductor
makes crazy faces to inspire you
while his back is turned
to the audience.
The Dream of Uncle Cleo
In my dream, Uncle Cleo stands in his dead brother’s home
and calls suddenly for prayer. “When we die, let us die quickly,
oh Lord, but let us be what we can in the meantime.”
My brother loudly says “amen,” and adds
“I’m having trouble with that ‘be what we can,’ myself.”
Uncle Cleo keeps on in that calm preacher’s voice of his
about our trip, says “there’s no use to leave before daylight.”
In reality, Uncle Cleo died old of diabetes and drink,
a few body parts at a time until his final day at a VA hospital.
I never heard him pray, but he really had that preacher’s voice.
He knew what it was to ‘be what he could,’ having been a sailor,
a shoe salesman, a drinker. He knew what it was to find himself
married on a drunken weekend. His brother didn’t live like this.
The drunken marriage didn’t last the weekend, but there was
another woman who stayed with him through many divorces,
including their own.
A Year Ago When You Told Us that
you were dying, I stared at you, thinking
it was one of your philosophical remarks,
served up between Schrödinger’s Cat
and the Platonic Ideal. We were eating popcorn
in the kitchen and it was just like that, you said
the worst was that telling your friends
would be like hitting a dish with a hammer,
hoping someone else could glue it back together.
This is the third of three posts in this series.
The Day Before When We
came downtown to see you,
we were cracking wise about
the hospital, but Phil was
suddenly aloof, determined
to get to your room, showing
no patience to the volunteer, a
nice-enough lady with a
metal angel pin. You
seemed old, but not enough,
sitting up with us talking
weakly about everything
but
before we left downtown we
wanted to see the museum
but it was closed. We walked
back to the station; Jenny
bought a Saint Peregrine
medal from a street vendor,
started to cry. I spent
the rest of that day
holding her hand, or with
my arm (which fell asleep)
around her on the train.
This is two of the three poems I intend to post in this series.
The Day After What We
called a wake, although we slept,
worthless disciples in the garden
of doubt and anguish over the
tumbling foothold of grief,
We smoked cigarettes, switched
to beer to get soberer, shaved
and put on clean clothes, clothes
we’d bury ourselves in,
were we dead ourselves
and not walking in the long shadow
behind the grave.
This is one of three poems I intend to post as the next three entries.
Insomnia
Insomnia, while it lasts, is like flying
downhill on a bike. We would love it
were it not for the denouement.
We do love it
under different names at different times:
the holiday weekend, cram sessions,
all the be-now-pay-later moments.
Names like focus, party mode,
and the Big Lie: wired. The promise,
never kept, that tomorrow will not
claim our time with interest, the loan
we didn’t ask for when we lie awake
spinning down mental slopes.
Pantoum: Mass Transit
The sun was starting to get a little low
when I parked the car in a parking deck
in Jacksonville where I took Southwest to Oakland
We stopped somewhere in Nevada Continue reading “Pantoum: Mass Transit”
Conjugating the Pick-Up Line
for S.D.
This isn’t a come-on, but –
he says, and you wait for something so clichéd
there should be a grammatical case for it –
the unbelievable inevitable,
perhaps, or way past tension:
the sense it’s all been said before,
with better lines and timing. Continue reading “Conjugating the Pick-Up Line”
The Road to Emmaus
For this reason the gospel was preached also to those who are dead, that they might be judged according to men in the flesh, but live according to God in the spirit.
1 Peter 4:6 NKJV
I walked a long road for this home-going:
tangled paths of memory. You both assumed
it was a trick. You were expecting flowing
wounds, blood-torn back—I looked as if hewn
from rock, and not a grave that thought it had me.
Peter, you were right, but didn’t see:
everyone had the same eyes. To be
drowning, to have your soul (demanded
from birth, the owed death waiting) returned—
all one, all the same. Peter, everyone dies,
but not all live. Some choose to burn
in prison, waiting to be freed. Why
judge the dead until you walk the sea?
Even the death of you will live in Me.
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