Memorial Day Review

As many of you already know, I have always included a few poems in my books relating to my experience and other veterans’ experience in combat and reflecting on those realities. I’ve been doing it for the past twenty years out of respect and out of a hope that one day people will understand the futility and misery of war. We aren’t to that point yet, but I refuse to believe we can’t get there. I chose to re-print a few of those poems here for this Memorial Day that deal directly with the loss of life war causes.

The VFW Rededicates the War Monument on the Courthouse Lawn on Memorial Day

An honor guard from the local chapter, old men

bent from time, hard work, and memories, fires

a salute from even older rifles, seven times three.

Uniforms pressed and creased neatly,

they unfurl the flag and snap it in place above

the marble names carved at perfect attention.

The gestures crisp, the sun bright, the words

 sincerely spoken all bring the crowd to tears.

A solitary trumpet sounds the final note of Taps.

The dead, not looking on from anywhere

and with no recall of why they died or why despite

their sacrifice the list grows longer, remain dead.

Translation

He’s fourteen years old and already dead,

splayed on barb wire like a squirrel on a spit.

His mother leaves the burning joss stick inside

a roadside altar close by as she carries a basket

full of balut—those fermented duck eggs

women eat in the shell that strengthen a fetus—

to sell in the market place.

Time is too short for incidental grief in war.

You are young compared to her but old to death.

The smell of rotted flesh and moldy earth

no longer make you cringe as you

rise from the bunker, piss in a trough,

brush your teeth with brackish water, and listen

to her screams as if she were a peacock mating.

You load your rifle as the salmon colored sun melts

across banyan trees, as ghosts ascend from a heated mist

that floats above the rice paddies, as all thought dissolves

into the primal ooze of your survival. The woman wails

in language you don’t understand or care to learn.

What you came to say has been spoken and what

she answers will take you years of pain to translate.

Drilling for Jesus

The dentist spoke of Jesus today as she drilled a hole

in one of my molars, how she was reading Genesis

and how difficult it was to get the Bible from all that

Sodom and Gomorrah sex and blood to a guy walking

on water and raising the dead because he loved us all.

Numbed and nervous, I squirmed through the sound

of torture—the high-speed whir, the suck and gurgle

of a water hose, the agonizing tremolo of smooth jazz

on Sirius radio—and the stench of pain in isopropyl air.

Feeling a twinge of despair and the desire to appear

brave, I shared my pretend knowledge of theology

using a thought delivered to me a priori because I

had suffered neither recent sex nor death, forgetting

in the epiphany that my mouth was stuffed with cotton.

“Hezeus uss who he ussent.” “What?” she said,

and the conversation left us both with an existential dread

as the truth misunderstood often will. Jesus was who

he wasn’t. We learn when young to hear the lie for real

if it serves us better. Forget Jesus for a minute.

Think Santa Claus and how easy it was for mom

to get your compliance in the month of December.

Forget Santa Claus, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, think

of my friend Bill who quit school and joined the Marines.

He was a child, neither good nor bad, full of self-doubt

and a sense of duty. Like many of us in those days

that followed the days when our fathers had saved

the world, he wanted to prove worthy of their deeds.

Posters that hung on the walls in the courthouse read

—The Marines Are Looking for a Few Good Men— 

and if you remember the Vietnam War, I think you can

guess where this is going. Billy stumbled on a land mine

with his left foot probably. No one knows for sure

because it was one of his pieces we never found.

Getting back to Jesus and the hole in my tooth, I said

“This isn’t the first time things got filled and fell apart.”

Meditations on the Jungle Ambush

There were nights, long strands of time tied together with a thin wire of fear

when you could hear the full moon keening as it rose to wait for death.

Its only job was to end someone’s loneliness forever by lighting

the path of a sniper’s bullet or casting a dim shadow across a trip wire.

You wanted to believe it hung there to run the tides receding at China Beach,

guide the course of a love you hoped to feel one day, capture the leap and swirl

of Basa fish or the unlocking of a Cac Dang flower, echo a tiger’s growl

or a Black Kite’s song, record the explosion of dew across the rice paddies.

Everything, even the hard click of brass as a round got chambered,

seemed more romantic and buoyant in the oblique and ductile glow.

In the end, all it did was burnish, and then not even from its own fire,

the monstrous clouds roiling above the banyan canopy overhead.

All it ever did was tempt you with its silent dusting of sugared light

to forget that each night ambush held the origin of your oblivion.

Parker’s Crossing, Tennessee – October 31, 2011

The store is a “middle-of-nowhere” place

stuffed with Confederate flags, toy muskets,

cheap statues of Nathan Bedford Forrest,

and peanut brittle. I’ve stopped for fuel

at Parker’s Crossing because the tank’s empty

and to quote my old man on his gambling days –

“This is the only game in town.”

My ghosts have always been silent

even on Halloween, but over the pump and flow

of fuel, beneath the cries of flocking crows,

beyond the clicking gallon counter,

and in spite of my wife’s incessant chatter,

sounds no longer from this natural world

rise in empty fields behind the building.

If I’m lucky, I’m insane and the sounds

carried on the autumn air are not real.

This explains with less terrifying logic

the human moans from a thick-throated wind,

the drum of boots on scarred earth, rifle fire,

the thud of northern steel against the soft flesh

of southern pride and the rush of a current

in the blood-red creek bed dry for a hundred years.

It’s all so vivid, as if the wind bridged echoes

of brother crying over dying brother with a burning

boy in my own, more recent, war dreams,

as if this simple store was built on blanched bones

and filled with cheap souvenirs to hide one fact –

the only worthy monuments for war are ghosts.

Namesake

Uncle Jim owed his sister nothing,

not abstinence from gin or vows

to quit smoking, no three bedroom house

with white picket fence and children

playing hopscotch on the front walk, no

guilt over his impotence. Consequently,

my mom was the only woman he trusted.

One day, a recurring headache

became unbearable. He sought

sanctuary without judgment.

I wish he would have died right there

in our kitchen over dinner.

Life best lived falls off the fast edges.

Six months later the nurse held  

a Lucky Strike in his trach tube

to feed the habit. We listened

as the phlegm growled

and watched as the catharsis of cancer

from lung to brain and back again

cured his addiction.

Five packs at 25 cents a pack,

a hundred smokes a day,

the need was all he owned

                        except for a crinkled photo of Jean,

who divorced him after his two week drunk

                         – her honeymoon –   

and a pack of “Pinkies” unused condoms

stowed in  his wallet “For luck,” he said once.

Oh, I guess he owned other things too

if you count dog tags, malaria,

and his insatiable need for booze that grew

from World War II and Iwo Jima

where slapdash deaths from lead and shrapnel

puzzled both physicists and theologians.

Even though my uncle seemed like both to me

on frosty morning fishing trips, he was neither

and finally, the weight of memory killed him.

The War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City

Fenced in by tanks and defused fuel air bombs,

 I snap photos of other tourists as they hesitate

to run their timid hands over  tools of death.

Why do we hold sacred the refuse of war?

My son asks with innocent curiosity as we

stand before the barrel of a rusted Howitzer

beneath the yellowed palms in Saigon.

It has to do with hope, I tell him, not a violent

awful faith in one god’s power over another’s

or the belief lottery tickets will cure the disease

driving their purchase, not even the expectation

of immortality, but that history may one day

teach some future, kinder people peace.