Never Such Innocence Again

I will have a new book of poems soon. My publisher says probably by early autumn. It is a collection of selected and new poems on a specific theme. The included poems come randomly chosen from the seven original volumes of earlier work because they follow the theme of war somehow, either through my personal experience or by some secondhand recounting. Although, a few are recently written and unpublished. I wanted to share my forward to the book, and I hope you will look for it when it comes out. The title is listed above.

Author’s Forward:

1. Coming Home Early Days:

Fear: He knew that he needed to be held. Part of his mind ordered him to bring someone close, stroke her hair, feel her heart and his beat together. Part of his mind recoiled with the fear of being touched, and this was the strongest, loudest, angriest, most hopeless part. The closer you bring someone to you, the farther you push them away. He had nothing to say. The physical power of words had been lost. Larger voices called, the hum of the fan in their bedroom, starlings whistling outside the window, a hungry cat squalling from the alley, the dead lying in dark back rooms and streets wiped clean of carnal attachments. Reality was only a lace curtain seen through when you weren’t even looking, easily ripped apart and separated by time and space, connected by the thinnest of threads, but mostly a veil. He knew words existed, but his language was now different from the rest of the world. It rained before dawn and he tried to count the drops as they—one two three—as they exploded against the windowpane into infinity. He had accepted death to survive. He was no stranger to irony—the hospital built next to a ski lodge, the biggest bass he ever saw broke water and snapped his line, his ex-wife married their divorce lawyer, his best friend’s only sins were venial, The man confessed once a week, prayed constantly, and killed no one in his hometown. He did not believe in any god until that day when his squad gathered at the edge of the dense and dark jungle where the rice paddies ended. The mortar shell fell through the gloaming and after it fell, left only the silence of his friend in a perfume of jasmine, cordite, and blood. Then, he believed. He knew that God was death, the Terror of living.

Therapy: Framed by degrees books computers and a broken clock, his doctor sits amid this refuse of her clinical kingdom explaining the bond between the squeeze of a trigger and the rush of blood through the brain, the pain with joy as if you swallowed a whole bowl of ice cream all at once. “That is one inconsistency of war to men of good conscience.” But she did not understand. No one knows, even an artist, what the primal mind chooses for its art—foreground, background, contrast, form, and substance—There is no search for sense in his thought anymore. Memories that bleed the brightest colors seek him out.

Blending In: In his favorite diner in his hometown in the early morning after coming home, he drinks his bitter coffee. The man at the counter on his right reads the news with feigned interest as if the print might be a bite of unbuttered toast. An old couple chew their scrambled eggs slowly like cows waiting for a truck to the abattoir. A young man in a white tee-shirt speaks with animated gestures to a forlorn waitress. Three grandmothers stuff their grandkids with pancakes and syrup. Outside the large window the sky folds over the highway as traffic comes and goes. The ebb and flow of ordinary life goes on while somewhere in his mind a bullet rips into flesh, a child lays across the unmoving corpse of his mother, jets whine low in the sunrise and the jungle explodes in fire. The scent of bacon and the clank of spoons against ceramic cups surrounds the room with a routine of life that has no knowledge of random death. Montaigne discovered four hundred years ago that nothing makes us remember it so well as the desire to forget it.

Re-Education: It begins by counting ceiling tiles during a lecture on fossils. Semoria is a reptilomorph named for a town in Texas. Winged lizards nested on the ground, unlike bats. Straight-ankle thedodants evolved into crocodiles and then, humans. He is learning these facts because his therapist told him education is the key to becoming a civilized human. In fact, he had known a thecodant in DaNang with perfect ankles. Her neck smelled like jasmine and vanilla and sweat. He paid her a dollar extra so she would whisper the name of his high school sweetheart as he came. He chose “Karen.” “Anapsids, synapsis, diapsids all may have been warm-blooded,” the professor’s voice echoes along the classroom walls and his disconnected shadow flutters along with it under the blanched flicker of the overhead lights. The young woman in the seat next to him is warm blooded, and she is no fossil. She smells like honeysuckle; her hair is a blonde curtain that must be gently parted with his fingers to reach her thoughts. Her sighs of boredom distract him. They sound like spring rain kissing a small lake. “Vocalization among dinosaurs would strongly suggest social interaction,” The professor chants his monotone mantra beside the blackboard. ‘Some cataclysmic event ended their reign over the earth. All that we have left are fragments of their bones.” What if dinosaurs died during TET in 1968, littering the city of Hue with their bones as the streets filled with smoke. He sits quiet among other students, learning that some knowledge is best kept to himself and so, pretends to be an actor in a great play who has been inspired not as much by character or plot, as the numb vacancy in his mind and a talent for being what he is not.

Dawn: Sunrise began to sneak through the breezy cracks in the old farmhouse as the amphetamines wore through his brain. Sunlight and shadows hopscotched across the furniture and floor. Hours must have passed in the cloud of smoke from burning cigarettes. His voice sounded like wet sandpaper on metal. No one had moved away from the group of friends gathered for his confession. A woman held him, and the rest of them sat at his feet. He began to feel empty. The oil of his being poured out on the heads of disciples, anointing them with his knowledge of philosophical treatises, theological mythology, sociological ramifications, and feral theories on the fall of man in war. He stood and took the woman by the hand and spoke no more. They climbed the stairs in the old farmhouse. They made love and slept. When he woke up, it was twilight of the same day. Cold and alone, even with a warm body beside him, the idea that he might be dying crowded into his thoughts. Opening the only window in the room, he crawled out on the roof as the sun folded itself into the earth. Blackness began to creep forward from the horizon, covering the gray so slowly he could feel the planet rotating on its axis. The spring warmth came apart like wet newspaper and the air chilled. The smell of dead flowers overwhelmed him, and he didn’t know where it came from. The lilacs and tulips had yet to even bloom. He sat wondering if they ever would.

2. Certifiable

My being a veteran injured in war

gets my widow two thousand dollars

toward funeral expenses provided

she can prove that I died of a disease

causally related to said war and if she

presents bureaus within bigger bureaus

notarized forms that verify my passing.

I have official letters from Congress

that specify this fact. Otherwise,

she gets two hundred and fifty dollars

for a death recorded as unsuitably fatal.