11 Veterans poems

(White River Junction, Vermont) Bringing “only what is needed—essential toilet articles” in a paper bag, dressed as for dying, one sees the dying plainly. These are the homecomings of Agamemnon, the odysseys to the underside of the web that weaves and unweaves while the suitors gorge upon plenty and the languishing sons at home unwish their warring fathers with strong electric fingers. The fathers are failing. In the Hospital Exchange, one sees the dying plainly: color televisions, beach towels, automatic razors— the hardware of the affluent society marked down to cost, to match the negative afflatus of the ailing, the bandages and badges of their status. Under the sandbags, rubber hoses, pipettes, bed-clamps, tax-exempt, amenable as rabbits, the unenlisted men are bleeding through their noses in a perimeter of ramps and apparatus. In that prosthetic world, the Solarium lights up a junk-pile of used parts: the hip that caught a ricochet of shrapnel; tattoos in curing meats; scars like fizzled fuses; canceled postage stamps; automated claws in candy; the Laser’s edge; and barium. The nurses pass like mowers, dressing and undressing in the razor-sharp incisions and the flowering phosphorescence. The smell of rubbing alcohol rises on desertions and deprivals and divorces. It is incorruptible. A wheelchair aims its hospital pajamas like a gun-emplacement. The amputee is swinging in his aviary. His fingers walk the bird-bars. There is singing from the ward room—a buzzing of transistors like blueflies in a urinal. War over war, the expendables of Metz and Chateau-Thierry, the guerillas of Bien Hoa and Korea, the draftees, the Reserves, the re-enlisters, open a common wavelength. The catatonic sons are revving up their combos in the era of the angry adolescent. Their cry is electronic. Their thumbs are armed with picks. The acid-rock guitarist in metal studs and chevrons, bombed with magnesium, mourns like a country yokel, and the innocents are slaughtered. On the terrace, there are juices and bananas. The convalescent listens to his heartbeat. The chaplain and his non-combative daughter smile by the clubbed plants on the portico. “They shall overcome.”

My father came down not killed from among others, killers or killed, for whom he'd worn a uniform, and he lived a long afterward, a steady man on the flattest of plains. I called after him many times, surprised when I heard the catch in my own voice. He didn't know how to find the solace of listening to someone else speak of what he'd seen and survived. He himself closed his own mouth against his own words. In the wrong sequence, his spirit, then his mind, and last his body crossed over that infamous, peat-inky, metaphorical water that has no far shore. I think he was carried like a leaf in currents so gentle that a duckling, had it been alive, could have braved them, but too strong for a leaf. And saturated with minerals that steadily replaced organic cells, the water turned my father, an ex-soldier, to leaf-delicate stone inscribed with the axioms of countless veins.

His army jacket bore the white rectangle of one who has torn off his name.  He sat mute at the round table where the trip-wire veterans ate breakfast.  They were foxhole buddies who went stateside without leaving the war. They had the look of men who held their breath and now their tongues.  What is to say beyond that said by the fathers who bent lower and lower as the war went on, spines curving toward the ground on which sons sat sandbagged with ammo belts enough to make fine lace of enemy flesh and blood.  Now these who survived, who got back in cargo planes emptied at the front, lived hiddenly in the woods behind fence wires strung through tin cans.  Better an alarm than the constant nightmare of something moving on its belly to make your skin crawl with the sensory memory of foxhole living.

But it’s too late to say you’re sorry. — The Zombies I Man, if you’re dead, why are you leading me to drink after five sober years? Sonny, can I get a witness? I had a Snow White vision of the prodigal son returning to America that day of my final hangover. I tried to clear the mixture of cobwebs and shooting stars from my brain with spit-warm Budweiser, but the hair of the dog just was not doing the trick. I ended up pummeling myself seven times that day and named each egg white load for a Disney dwarf. The first was Dopey. The final was Sleepy, I think, or Droopy. II Last year you scrawled a letter to me about your first and final visit to the Vietnam Memorial and how your eyes reflected off the shiny black stone and shot back into your brain like guidons unfurling the stench of cordite and the boy screams of men whose souls evaporated into morning mists over blue-green jungles. You had to be there, you said. That’s where you caught the cancer, you said. III Sonny. Tonight I had a dream of Mom’s death twenty years too late and now my eyes will not close like I imagine the lid on her cheap casket did. I was not there when she died. Home on leave from Basic Training, you stood in for me because I was running scared through the drugged-out alleys of America, hiding from those Asian shadows that would finally ace you and now, now in the dark victory of your Agent Orange cancer, it gives me not one ounce of ease to say fuck Nixon and Kissinger, fuck all the generals and all the armies of God and fuck me, twenty years too late. IV History is history and thank God for that. When we were wise-ass American boys in our fifth grade geography class, we tittered over the prurient-sounding waves of Lake Titticaca …Titti … ca-ca and we never even had the slightest clue that Che was camping out en las montañas de Bolivia … We never knew American chemists would kill you slicker than slant-eyed bullets. V Damn Sonny. Five sober years done squeaked by like a silent fart and I’m on autopilot, sitting in a bar hoisting suds with ghosts, yours and my slowly evolving own. When we were seventeen with fake I.D.’s, we got into the Bucket of Blood in Virginia City and slurped sloe gin fizzes while the innocent jukebox blared “She’s Not There” by the Zombies. Later that drunken night you puked purple splotches onto my new, white Levis and a short, few years into your future this lost nation would award you two purple hearts, one of which your mother pressed into my hand that bright day we filed you under dry desert dirt.

Soldier from the wars returning, Spoiler of the taken town,

marches in uniform down the traffic stripe at the center of the street, counts time to the unseen web that has rearranged the air around him, his left hand stiff as a leather strap along his side, the other saluting right through the decades as if they weren't there, as if everyone under ninety were pervasive fog the morning would dispel in its own good time, as if the high school band all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms across the drift, nothing but empty graves now to round off another century, the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew, the wives and children blowing kisses.

He rides at their head; A crutch by his saddle just slants in view, One slung arm is in splints, you see, Yet he guides his strong steed—how coldly too. He brings his regiment home— Not as they filed two years before, But a remnant half-tattered, and battered, and worn, Like castaway sailors, who—stunned By the surf’s loud roar, Their mates dragged back and seen no more— Again and again breast the surge, And at last crawl, spent, to shore. A still rigidity and pale— An Indian aloofness lones his brow; He has lived a thousand years Compressed in battle’s pains and prayers, Marches and watches slow. There are welcoming shouts, and flags; Old men off hat to the Boy, Wreaths from gay balconies fall at his feet, But to him— there comes alloy. It is not that a leg is lost, It is not that an arm is maimed, It is not that the fever has racked— Self he has long disclaimed. But all through the Seven Days’ Fight, And deep in the Wilderness grim, And in the field-hospital tent, And Petersburg crater, and dim Lean brooding in Libby, there came— Ah heaven!—what truth to him.

Stars from five wars, scars, Words filled with ice and fear, Nightflares and fogginess, and a studied regularity. Gon’ lay down my sword ’n’ shield— Down by the river side, down by the river side— Down by the river side...

i haven't touched a gun since i got back twelve years people think that's strange they weren't there

Tuesday nights at the VFW same faces same complaints same bad coffee the best people i know