Fraternity Brothers, 1970

Two years, Rich Cook had lived across the hall,

Giving me rides in his damaged car

Where we breathed the stink left behind

By a creek that flash-flooded hood high,

But this summer Cook was a soldier

In the Ohio Guard, and I was reading

The Victorians and Faulkner's novels

At Kent State where classes had resumed.

Since my second beer, I'd been posturing

As a near-miss survivor, and now Cook

Was drunk and angry and ready,

He said, to shoot me if history

Repeated itself.  He carried

A pistol in that flooded Ford

I could see through the screen door

Where white moths were frantic to enter,

And he wondered out loud if I'd piss myself

If he decided to show-and-tell me

Just how cowardly I could be up close

With him and brother Bowers just back

From two tours and a pair of Purple Hearts,

Somebody who had survived

Hamburger Hill and nameless night patrols.

Cook asked if I was a Communist now

Or just some big-mouth asshole drinking

Beer with someone who was worth a shit,

And I was ready to renounce my years

Of second-hand graduate essays,

All of those sweet-sounding platitudes

Seeming as simple as pre-meal prayers

While I was composing apologies

And expecting both brothers to lay

A combat-tested beating upon me.

I could say the overhead kitchen light beamed

A Saint Paul moment of self-knowledge

And conversion, but what it did was

Flicker once when the refrigerator

Hummed into life just before Bowers

Said “Fuck the Guard” so matter-of-factly

I heard the period drop into place,

Ambushing one argument, at least,

In Youngstown where May was fishtailing

Into June, the three of us positioned

As if we still occupied our late-Sixties rooms,

A telephone hanging outside Cook's door,

The black receiver he had twice torn loose

Before sweeping into my room

After two a.m., both times silhouetted

Against the light, spitting, “It's for you.”

Appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal and

Bringing Back the Bones: New and Selected Poems

After the Aberfan Disaster

On Oct. 21, 1966, in Wales, an 800 foot high “tip”

of rock, coal, mud, and shale collapsed, crushing

an elementary school, killing 116 children and 5

teachers.

In this story, the assembled children

Have just sung “All Things Bright and Beautiful.”

In this story, a survivor recalls

“In that silence you couldn't hear a bird,”

The slag thirty feet deep, a certainty.

In this story, the crushed children are called

By their parents.  In this story, so few

Of them answer they become miracles,

The kind where ten lepers are cleansed, leaving

A colony of others to fester.

In this story, the children are smothered

By indifference, the company's and mine,

Because I am cowering from the draft,

Only college between me and combat.

That afternoon, I drive my father's car

One hundred miles per hour on a road

With a dozen intersections, and slow,

Trembling, into the sudden afterward

Of my brief, self-made miracle, thinking

What else proves I belong to the future?

Those children and their teachers are as dead

As two friends killed in cars.  Some minister,

Days later, repeats, “In all things, design”

In a sermon I overhear, sounding

As if he's casting a blessing on rape.  

A half mile from that service are slag heaps

High enough to take the light an hour

Early each evening.  This story has me

Cautiously climbing each one with a friend

Soon to be blown apart in Vietnam.  

Could there have been an alternate story

To the one I was breathing behind him?

So safely enrolled, who had I become

But a patient with purchased remission,

Reading about loss in expensive rooms?

Appeared in The Gettysburg Review and

in the collection The History of Permanence

     (Stephen F. Austin University Press)

The Sorrows

Whatever the Sunday, the sorrows kept the women

     in the kitchen,

My cousins and their mothers, my grandmother, her sister,

      all of them

Foraging through the nerves for pain.  They sighed and rustled

      and one would

Name her sorrows to cue sympathy's murmurs, the first

      offerings

Of possible cures: three eggs for chills and fever,

      the benefits

Of mint and pepper, boneset, sage, and crocus tea.

      Nothing they

Needed came over-the-counter or through prescriptions

      not bearing

A promise from God, who blessed the home remedies

      handed down

From the lost villages of Germany for the aunt

      with dizzy spells,

For the uncle with the steady pain of private swelling;

      for passed blood,

For discharge and the sweet streak from the shoulder.  

      In the pantry,

Among pickled beets and stewed tomatoes--the dark,

      honeyed liquids;

The vinegar and molasses sipped from tablespoons

      for sorrows

So regular they spoke of them as laundry to be smoothed

       by the great iron

Of faith which set creases worthy of paradise.  And there,

      when only

A hum came clear, they might have been speaking from clouds

      like the dead,

But what mattered  when the room went dark was the voices

      reaching into

The lamp-lit living room of men who listened then, watching

      the doorway

And nodding at the nostrums offered by the tongues

      of the unseen

As if the sorrows were soothed by the lost dialect

      of the soul

Which whispered to the enormous ache of the imminent.

Appeared in Southern Poetry Review and the collection

The Fire Landscape (University of Arkansas Press)

Selflessness

In the animal kingdom, among fish,

one father carries all of the laid eggs

in his mouth, sixty-five day starvation

to make that flexible, deep mouth a womb.  

Such sacrifice, spitting them out at last,

following that fast with the daily chores

of parenting: to guard them while they feed,

to take them back into his mouth like God.

Those babies need to grow before something

hungry finds them.  They need a place to sleep

safe enough to wake again to feeding,

watched carefully by their selfless father.

He's a living prayer, that catfish who knows

each child as he opens his mouth for them.

Though every father has limits, and so

does this one, turning his back, one morning,

as they feed, swimming away while he still

knows them, before his children grow so large

he can't tell them from what he hungers for.

If he forgets to flee, he will eat them.

Appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review and

the collection The History of Permanence

(Stephen F. Austin University Press)

A Citizenry of Birds

Tarantulas leave behind footprints of silk—Harper's

My neighbor, shortly after sunrise,

Says he loves to hear English

In the morning from his backyard birds.

They're citizens, he tells me, born here,

So many generations

With us, their accents have disappeared.

His mouth flexes.  The pink horizon

Has nearly vanished. We are

Surrounded by the bright eggs of May.

My nod, meant to be neutral, narrows

The distance to empathy.

Only our lawns show the paths of shoes.

Suddenly, along our street, houses

Are raising flags, becoming

The embassies of allied countries.

When a siren opens full-throated

On the nearby county road,

I try to translate its accident.

Squalled from his architecture of leaves,

Vowels seem a needle's cry

Seeking a sample of suspect blood.

Some of the letters cannot be sung;

His lawn displays the sparkling,

Bent admission to his blue-rimmed door.