4pm

Battle of Franklin, 30 November 1864 (4pm-9pm)

Confederate Casualties - 7,000 men

More than 1,750 men were killed outright or died of mortal wounds, 3,800 seriously wounded and 702 captured (not including cavalry casualties). 15 out of 28 Confederate Generals were casualties. 65 field grade officers were lost. Some infantry regiments lost 64 % of their strength at Franklin. There were more men killed in the Confederate Army of Tennessee in the 5- hour battle than in the 2-day Battle of Shiloh, the 3-day Battle of Stones River, and the 7-day Campaign in Virginia for the Federal Army.


as far as one could see
a grey wave left and right
where individual will
had no power

we were marching forward
twenty thousand strong
and not a damn one of us
could do a damn thing about it

and I am not ashamed to say
as I watched those men on horseback
Adams, Cleburne and all the rest
and men they were

I am not ashamed to say
I followed
where without
I might have not

and I knew they would die
such targets
of grey and gold
of hat and saber

of a generation
too damn good to lose
but we did
and dead is dead

and the next day
we marched on without them
as if we marched
without our souls

++++++

around 4:30pm

shots fired
I mean fired
as in fire
walls of flame
curtains of smoke
nostrils burning
yelling, shrieking
men possessed
faces contorted
eyes bulging
knuckles white
amidst torn cloth
and ripped flesh
and tongues dry
of water
and faces full
of death
and above it all
those souls trapped
wailing
buried in flesh
as more
into the breech fall
fodder, fodder
our young boys
the sky turning crimson
this indian summer day
this soil nourished
these fields of red
of blood
our blood
once seen
never
again

1944 (walking)

Walking barefoot upon damp soil turned for seed, Mary spoke: Late at night, in bed, when I close my eyes, I can still smell of him, still feel his weight against me, feel a flush upon my face, a warmth, and it feels as it did, his breath washing over me, the two of us gently rocking. And I think of a porch, of Tennessee, sunrise, him standing behind me. I'm in a rocking chair, eight, maybe nine months pregnant. We don't talk. His hands on the chair. I can smell the wetness of his shower, clean, fresh shaved. Birds chirping and the chair creaking. The three of us. He is making breakfast. Maple bacon, eggs, fresh squeezed orange juice.

We live in the country. A small ranch house with a red tin roof. His parents live just down the road. We watch them walking up the drive, his mother with a basket, his father, a handful of books. They've been married over forty years, each looking much like the other, walking the way one walks when one is walking just to walk, the way one walks in the country, upon dirt and gravel where turkeys roam the woods and deer are not afraid. His mother is bringing lunch, his father, conversation, another book to discuss, to read, to be read aloud, a tradition I've been told, one page at a time, stopping at each sentence, wearing the author's words like jewels, a dignity given as only writers give to the written word.

Of course you know, said Mary, this only exists in my mind.

I know, said Kathrin. I've lived an entire life with Erich.

++++++

We would eat on wood. Natural light flooding the table. Silverware heavy and balanced in the hand upon plates resonating with the sound of artisans and kilns. We would have what we needed and no more. A house where one could breathe, where space was as important as furniture and light would be honored of window and lamp, of candle and torch. There would be pictures of friends and family and a room for guests with a sturdy bed he had made himself with oak and cast iron. And everywhere would be books. And not a day would pass without reading, to me, to my belly, and eventually, to our child. We would live with words as we did with vegetables and fruit, bread and whole milk, of butter soft as Sunday morning. There would be horses too and a barn. And the smell of hay after a rain, of grass grown to mow, of the neighing of life out our window. In the summer we would walk the land barefoot and in winter with the wool of local sheep, warm in the company of community, of friends and neighbors who knew sacrifice and knew the difference between noun and verb, lip and hand. If I'm going to go insane, said Mary, I'm going to this place.

Kathrin stopped and looked at Mary. If you go, take me.

++++++

I wasn't finished.

Sorry.

We would also have music. Teach me he would, of bow and string, of the heart in a note, of wood and flesh conjuring spirit. We would dance, rain or shine and let our hair grow just so we could feel the sweat and lather of honest labor, of the hoe and axe, of the hammer and nail. And the barn would grow and we would raise our own sheep, have a dog too. A family. Laughter in the evenings watching fireflies, serenaded by crickets under a sky so dark it was light, our own private field of diamonds he would say, teaching constellations with stories of boys and wolves and perhaps a bull. He would kneel in the yard, his arm pointed to the heavens like an arrow, a cherub of a child on his knee and within me would warm the womb to bake another and grow, multiply this love, this divine manifestation.

Five Hours

Tonight, I sit with an open window.
Listening to crickets seesaw back and forth.
A family of owls is sending signals into the dark.
And a breeze shakes the leaves on their hinges.
The air is autumn cool.
Only the light of my monitor illuminates my room.
Not a cloud in the night sky.
Mauve around the edges, inky blue on top.
In the distance I hear a train.
Following the Harpeth river on the east of town.
A place some hundred and fifty years ago.
Boys in butternut charged into the twilight.
Two miles.
Over open fields.
Against boys in blue.
Fortified with osage.
Behind breastworks.
Supported by cannon.
Three miles or so from where I sit.

A union bullet one day I found in my yard.
Where ten thousand pieces of metal found flesh.
This fifty-eight calibre did not.
I read last night our campaign in North Africa.
Lasting six month of 1943.
Accounted for 4893 casualties.
Our boys in gray and blue.
Just to the West of that railroad track.
Suffered 10000 dead and wounded.
In five hours.
Most of which, it is reported.
Occurred in the first waning hour of twilight.
Just a few miles from here.
Where that whistle blows.
Where they were buried.
Under the very breastworks charged.
On a chilly December morning.
Their final coat.
Of rich Tennessee soil.

blue eyes brimming

She was autumn though a window, herding leaves across the yard not raked, not touched of design as open plains full of mustangs. Full as flask, her blue eyes brimming, full of summer sighing, a warmth poured forth across the porch, each plank bleating bellies of Thanksgiving. And her fruit bore the rains and the suns, sighing too of shooting stars coming home under gravity's guns. Somewhere, unseen, an owl; and round the bend, over the levee flows a quiet river, home of fish not fought, of fowl not caught, of autumn dressing for the last dance, a child caught between father and mother, between summer and winter.

1944 (first sips)

Just one night. And my love continues to grow. Do you think I'm crazy?

No. Sometimes the first sip of coffee is better than the last.

But just one night. How can that--

Look, you have something almost every woman wants. Something, well, . . .

What do I have Kathrin? He's gone.

No. Nein. He is not gone. He can never be gone. You must understand this. You have that perfect love, captured, suspended in amber so to speak. It can never not be. It can never change. It can never become something less beautiful, less desired.

Mary smiled. I wish I could see it that way.

My first sip of Walter was as your Virgil. Over time, the coffee grew cold. Then bitter. So this is what I have. The cold and the bitter with the first. And when you have all three, you don't have just the first, you don't have what you have, and will have, with Virgil, for as long as you hold his memory, his divinity. It is a kindling, a spark you must protect. Others will think you insane, but pay no mind to that jealousy. It is, what you have, what we all want, what we all dream of, what we all take into our pillows, wet or dry.

++++++

Casualties have slowed. I've been given two days leave.

Oh.

My friends are wanting to go to Paris.

Wonderful city. A place of dreams.

Yeah.

You will have fun. It will be good for you.

I'm not going.

Why not?

I was there not long ago. I'd rather let those memories have their own space.

++++++

And what of these two days?

I'm going to find my smile.

Oh really.

And you are coming with me.

And how do you propose we do that?

We look where we have not been looking. Someplace our feet can take us. Someplace that requires no money, where there are no crowds. Where it is just you and I and we hold our thoughts like two little girls with a secret and we discover again the flower, the field, the bird and the sky. I want to plant my feet in the loam, to cadge the nourishment of soil as if my toes were seeds and my legs but stalks. I want to turn to the sun as a sunflower and breath the day into my belly, this little rotund life that knows nothing of this war, conceived in love, as you say, everlasting. I want to see the colors of spring as if with glasses, as if with the eyes of Monet, as if my hands were sable. And to inhale the aroma of nature, of branch and leaf, of pregnant fields and feel this life under my feet as this life above them.

1944 (coffee)

Have you told your parents?

No.

Kathrin took a sip of coffee. Mary rimmed her cup with her finger looking into the rising steam.

I don't want to bore you.

I didn't ask.

You see, they never wanted me to be a nurse. Not a respectable endeavor for a young lady. Beneath my dignity, which really meant beneath theirs. My father is an investment banker. Member of the community. Works hard, late hours. Something I never understood considering what time banks close. My mother is a woman of society. She lives, eats, breathes social connection, like a flower needing sunshine and rain. I often have this horrible thought in my head of her wilting if she can't host or attend the next party. For my mother, not so much my father, but for her, appearances are reality. When I told her I wanted to be a nurse, the look on her face. You would have thought I was running away from home to join the circus. All she could say was wait till your father gets home. As if I didn't have the authority. So I waited in my room. Father was late, as usual. And with each passing hour, I came to hate my mother more and more.

Kathrin took another cup of coffee. She gave no feedback. Mary continued.

It wasn't that she didn't want me to be a nurse. I understood that. What I didn't understand, although I should have because it had been this way all my life, is how she let me sit in my room for hours, alone. Not once did she come and sit with me, not once did she ask why. Never. Not even afterward. Instead, I listened to her giving orders to the staff, bustling around downstairs. You see, she had a party to prepare for. I was planning my life. She was planning for a party. I'm boring you.

No. This is inside of you. Let it out.

To make a long story short, the day I was to leave, neither my mother nor my father came to see me off. I left on a Saturday. My father was still in bed. My mother busy with the next whatever. The atmosphere was suffocating. Felt as if they were yelling at me with their silence. This is how they sent me to war.

When is the last time you talked?

We don't. Just letters. Letters that say nothing. They still think of me as the little girl that disobeyed them, disregarded their wishes, ignored their wisdom, made a mistake. Every letter has the scent of I'm not going to tell you I told you so. Part of the problem is, that little girl no longer exists. They have no idea of what is happening here. No idea what I have seen, experienced, done. How I have changed. Who I am.

This war is not going to last forever.

I know.

1944 (in silence)

I miss the bombers she said. You think I'm crazy. But I discovered there are two kinds of fear; and only one can fill your cup, at a time. I prefer the fear I can hear. The other fear is much worse. When I'm here alone, the house is quiet. Just me and the clocks, ticking. And I know, I know no one is coming. Odd, don't you think, that in war, the greater fear is silence, absence, of the empty chair; or perhaps it is what fills that silence. The endless reliving of stories that will never change.

I had no answer and so we sat for awhile. In silence.

++++++

Tell me, who knows of your baby?

No one I said.

The father?

Dead. He's dead. Died in my arms. His life within me less than twenty-four hours. (pause) What do I tell his child.

Kathrin spoke in German: Ich liebte Ihren Vater. Wie er mich liebte. Und von dieser Liebe, ist diese göttliche Liebe, dort Sie. This is what you say.

I didn't need translation. Pulling out his journal, my hand shaking, I handed it to her. She ran her fingers over the blood stained pages, turning each with the same care she had shown Erich's letters. Nothing could be heard but breathing and then the turning of a page.

++++++

Come with me, she said. We will have a drink. Good German wine, not that french crap you've been drinking. They think they know how to make wine but their soil is too rich, produces lazy grapes. Here, take a sip. Let it sit, let the bouquet bloom. Inhale. As if roses. Nose and tongue, working together. One breathes wine as much as drinks it.

And so we drank, sipping, breathing, not another word between us. Then she sighed. Quite a luxury, this wine. Each time it passes my lips I feel grateful and guilty. I've drunk a lot since Walter died. But I've never been drunk.

1944 (the letters)

That night she took me to the kitchen, to the table. From a small drawer she withdrew two letters. I could not tell in the poor light, but her hands seemed unsteady, a slight tremble I think but it could have just been my fatigue or even my imagination. The letters were from Erich, from the eastern front. One prior to Stalingrad, one during the siege. Carefully, she laid them out before me and then stood back, looked at me, and still not a word said. I leaned over. The letters were in his native language, of which I couldn't read a word.

Do you see what I see she said. I shook my head. Look closer. Her words said with such force of integrity, each syllable as hammer on chisel upon granite, I felt ashamed. There was something here, something important to her, but I could not read the language. I leaned in again. Kept looking, hoping she would give me a clue. One is clean, she said, the penmanship precise. The other, dirty, the writing jagged, uneven, almost unreadable. They both say the same insipid nonsense that boys write to their mothers. But look. Can you see what I see. It is not in the words. It is in the hand. His hand. You see how it shakes. You see the smudges, the stains, the dirt, the lack of care. Look at them side by side. Tell me what has happened to my son.

Her eyes didn't blink and I felt compelled, almost commanded to look again as if to see into her world, her pain, her lost, of how a mother sees the world in what is not said, aware, acutely aware of the slightest change and in this change to imagine the world, to imagine the bitter cold that unsteadied a hand, of the conditions that fouled a letter, of the fatigue that aged her son. They were, these letters, as they had been written, summer and winter, day and night, hope and fear. This was the last communication, this letter on the right. The one that if I could have read the language, would have been hard to decipher.

I stood back. Her hand on the table was trembling. You are going to have a child, a son as you say. Love him every day. Again her words washed over me with an intensity, as if within her was a furnace, her lips a bellows. My arms opened as did hers. With her lips next to my ear she whispered, Not a day. Not a day you don't love him. Not one. I held her tighter and in a whisper of a whisper, as if speaking to herself, as if I had squeezed the words from her, she repeated, Nicht ein Tag. Kein Tag du liebst ihn nicht. Nicht eine.

1944 (pregnant)

ed note: Spring 1945, the field hospital has moved into Germany. Nurses are garrisoned in town, Mary with a young widow, her son missing in action.

The feeling started not as a feeling at all, not as a thought, not even as a suspicion. Just one day everything looked different. Sound sounded different. The flow of movement, consistent motion, appeared as if somehow removed in the way of knowing your hand is in water but not feeling wet. Winter and summer all in one in the blink of an eye, before the finished memo or the falling of a leaf, feet steady as the standing in a canoe did finger feel upon the pen silent on paper. Of sitting in a theatre watching a movie no one else sees. And the looks. As if you have changed. Words, one thing, all dressed up, wrapped and bowed, but the eyes, the darting, the second looks, the whispers of lash and blink. A drifting, that first push away, of foot on wood, a shove, then the rocking, water lapping, each knowing the path has parted and choices made and what was before can never be again and whether there is sadness or anger or disgust or just confusion is for a later time to untangle. This is how I knew, before any test would confirm, I knew and so did she, my german friend, my landlady, the mother of a son missing somewhere out East, somewhere where letters were lost and what was sent was not returned. She knew. And when she put her hand on my belly, for she was not an old woman, and I felt her warm fingers splay across my circumference, as a hand on a globe might, I wanted something I could not define. I wanted her to keep her hand there, her arm as my umbilical cord, fearful of what, I could not say, but fearful of separation, fearful of losing that touch, her touch and all I imagined it to be. I was pregnant. She knew. I felt seduced that she did.

++++++

Did you hear said Kate. I didn't. Hey, her voice rising as dust, did you hear the news. I was staring at the truck behind us, watching those two blank faces in the cab, bouncing like lightning, a few seconds after us. Well, it appears we are going to be stopping for awhile. Garrisoned in town. Good news, huh. Yeah, I said, not hearing a word and not wanting to hear another.

++++++

We arrived in town, more like a village. Not exactly like France, but not as bad as we imagined. Faces were long, like the war. Toll paid. Full price. For a road to nowhere.

++++++

Her name was Kathrin. Early forties. Recently widowed. Her husband, Walter, had been a major in the Luftwaffe (JG 26), only recently killed in the winter offensive, Unternehmen Bodenplatte. Their entire living room seemed a shrine, of photographs, of memorabilia, mostly pre-war, although it had not always been that way. Handsome, hair parted on the side and slicked to the left revealing a strong sloping forehead and aquiline nose, he was, she said, a man in love with his vocation, at peace above the earth in a way he never seemed to be on it.

They had married young. A dashing couple. Blessed of child within the year. Without irony, she told Mary, she felt the mistress, a compromise accepted from the start. Erich, conceived on the honeymoon, was a gift. As if Walter knew she needed more than he could give; or, she mused, perhaps a diversion. He wanted to fly. Everything else was second. I could live with my place within the marriage. How he treated his son was harder to take.

Erich, sent East and missing since early '43, resembled his father. And there the similarities ended. Luftwaffe to Wehrmacht. Air to ground. Fought like cats and dogs, sometimes to blows. Both were strong-willed, stubborn. The old man cried only once. Briefly. The life of his loins delivered by courier. A few words that said nothing. A matter, Kathrin confided, never spoken of between them. On the day, they sat in the kitchen, the document between them, both staring, he drumming his thumbs. After some time, without a word, he got up, packed his portfolio, and with jacket and cap walked out the door, the sound of his heels echoing long after he was gone. From that day, Kathrin said, she never wore shoes inside the house again. And forbid anyone else from doing so.

No one in Erich's unit had escaped the winter of Stalingrad, the Soviet encirclement. Simply no word one way or the other. An army on the map one day, gone the next. Presumed dead she had been told, fought with honor implied. But words couldn't hide the shame. A national disgrace. Paulus's Sixth Army had not just been defeated, but destroyed. An unmitigated, unprecedented disaster. And her son had been a part of this. This tragedy no one would talk about. Even neighbors withdrew their shoulder.

Over wine, Kathrin confessed, there was some tortured hope he was alive, captured, not killed, tempered somewhat in the thought of russian imprisonment, of the brutality of labor camps, of Siberia imagined. At other times, as reports and gossip and rumor spread, death seemed the more humane option. Either way, she lived alone now. Her face prematurely lined, her eyes holding a pain of the sharpest blue, her bearing stoic with only a hint of the beauty seen on the wall, in those faded photographs, of better times, of another life it seemed. She was a woman, Mary said, who never smiled. Nor, for that matter, frowned.

++++++

Casualties were less than before as the snow became a memory and a few flowers began to bloom giving color to an otherwise pastel landscape of beige and slate, of stone and cobble, of coats wool as sheep and noses still crimson from winter. Each morning, Kathrin prepared tea. Each morning they sat and talked and sipped. Mainly of Mary. Sometimes of Erich. Occasionally of Walter. Then one morning, without indication, Kathrin leaned over her cup and declared, as one declares of a birthday forgotten remembered, You are with child. Do not deny it.

++++++

I stood, lifted my shirt. She looked as if watching for movement, still as a pointer before pheasant, nose slightly to the air, noble, proud, intelligent, the elegant line of her cheek bearing a crescent of morning light. Surveying my belly from left to right, sitting up straight, Kathrin spoke as if the two of us were pregnant, as if this was some sort of joint project. May I.

I nodded and her hand rose slowly. I remember the warmth. Her hands were so warm. Then I remembered how she had palmed her cup of tea and I wondered how long she had sat there, waiting. And I wondered what it meant, to her.

duet: poem and art

Jasmine Hazlehurst, inspired by the poem deciduous doubloons, created the gorgeous fiber-art to the right. The post can be found here: Autumn Song. Jasmine, to say the least, I'm blown away. Your work is brilliant and I'm honored.

something more

She put her finger to her lips. The walls were thin. We could be heard. But there was something in her expression that belied the request. Something more. Like a note passed in class with a smile, with a touch in the passing that lingers just a little longer than necessary, like a kiss stolen in a shadowed corner, voices heard, footsteps near. As lips touch; and the warmness of breath is shared. And a memory imbedded, of wintergreen and lilac and the soft stroke of nails on the nape of the neck, of tender softness pressing with each breath, of the texture of denim, the freshness of shampooed hair, the caress of a cold nose.

into your time

I want to see into your time, your history, pass the veneer of hair and skin and nail. To see a life in the movement of eye, of hand. How you hold an object--in your mind--the attention given, paid. How you honor sun, shade, branch, leaf and bird. How you float on thought, comfortable wet as dry, loving each as children. I want to see how the light reflects off the curve of your cheek in the afternoon, how your eye holds a tear with the courage to cry of beauty as well as the broken vase. I want to know your weathered wood and supple leather, to breathe in their stories and feel each grain of age grown, earned. I want to know what you think, when you kneel, of wood, of stone, of down matters not. There is a depth, here. A life steeped in the compassion of loss. I see it in your bearing, the touch of your hand, the way you hold my words in your eyebrows and let them down gently into your smile. Sincere as sunrise.

1944 (a reason)

Mary and Virgil step out of the ambulance. Their feet crunch snow, which has been steadily falling and again the plume of their breath reaches out, touching. Their arms lace behind each other's back.

M: You said you didn't know what this was. What did you mean?

V: Things are not always as they appear. As this, is not.

M: What is it then, if not what it appears?

V: I don't know.

M: Is that suppose to make me feel better?

V: I'm not trying to make you feel anything. You asked a question. I gave an answer.

M: No. You gave me some mumble jumble.

V: Look, I'm not going to say I love you.

M: Well that is very brave of you.

V: I have seen a lot of brave things. This is not one of them.

M: Then what is it? What was this? Can you tell me that?

V: No. I can't explain it. But there is something more here.

M: Like what?

V: Something beyond anything I've known before.

M: How do you know?

V: A few days ago, in hospital, the first time I saw you. I knew.

M: What did you know Virgil?

V: I knew you were different from this war. As different as one could be.

M: Talk to me. Tell me what that means.

V: It means when I saw you, I saw everything. I saw life. I saw a reason.

M: For what? A reason for what?

V: To live.

A Reading: sensual musings

sensual musings: A Reading

1944 (yelling)

She gets up having slept in her stale clothes. Too damn cold to change. Too damn tired to care. Her back aching of army cot. Her fingers from lack of gloves. Her eyes from eighteen hours of standing surgery, full of arms and legs amputated, of gaunt young faces bewildered, ash-gray in the way of morning campfire and about as resigned.

She pours cold water into her steel helmet, fishes her toothbrush from a pocket and scrubs at coffee stains. Outside, trucks are arriving, first the brakes, then the shouting. She tunes it out the way one tunes out static between channels. Listening without hearing. Able to decipher the important shouts from the not so important. These damn mornings. Full of yelling. Shouting. Bitter cold. A brief respite between endless days, with necks stiff as death, arms amputee sore and more wounded than beds.

She drinks her bitter coffee then heads by habit, quickly, to the latrine. To the smell and odor of a communal hole in the ground. She could take a shit in the middle of the camp and no one would look twice. But damn if she walks in from town without her helmet. Even here, the germs of chickenshit pettiness survive. Like fucking lice on an indigent orphan.

Kate. Kicks cot. Kate. Time to get up.

Why are you yelling?

Didn't know I was. Now get your arse up.

Audio

In the mood to do audio Readings and/or Commentary. If there is a recent post you'd like read, please leave your request in the comments.

deciduous doubloons

Like Fall, like deciduous doubloons, I watched scarf, blouse, skirt slip quietly from shoulder and limb. Not like rain, not all at once like lightning, but like autumn, like those weeks on stage, the preening of leaf, proud in the blush of sugary death. And I knew, in that moment, I was dead to all I had known before, her breath fluttering the pages of my knowledge to the wind of her southern educated lips.

1944 (quotes-1)

"We live as fleas on the belly of this war, one divine fingernail from extinction."

Virgil to Jesse

Frazier Museum

On Saturday, I accompanied forty-two ninth and tenth graders to the Frazier International History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky. Housed downtown in a beautiful three-story brick building is a collection of arms and armor from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century, from the tournament and joust to the repeating rifles of Marlin and Winchester; from the long sword and bow to the wheellock, from Agincourt to Little Big Horn.

The Frazier Museum, home of two world-class collections (Britain's royal armouries including the Tower of London and the Frazier Permanent Collection), is clean, organized and filled with placards denoting king, country, context and significance. Every forty-five minutes, a live demostration is held, or, as they like to call it, a historic interpretation. To augment these interpretations and give depth to the arm and armor within the context of history, are a multitude of recorded media set up in booths, in corners and in theaters. Each floor also displays several life-sized dioramas, bringing life to these instruments of death and destruction.

Upon arrival, we divided our students into groups of ten, attended our welcome presentation of rule and regulation and then quartered the museum. I took my ten students to the third floor and we proceeded to work our way down. What happened next, I am ashamed to say, I should have anticipated, but did not. In short, my group, as did the others, took in 1000 years of history in what could only be called a fly-by. To follow my group at their pace meant to read nothing, to watch nothing. Displays were to their minds and hearts as rain to hard soil.

When we boarded the bus two hours later, my first thought was to come back, to spend the day to fully appreciate the treasures of time housed here. To see beyond the wood and metal, and perhaps grasp some insight or at least some comprehension of man and the need to draw lines and draw blood, something happening today as it did for virtually every generation before us. We were in a house of death, of weapons build by men, by the minds of men, commissioned by kings, to do as all arms are meant, to maim, kill and destroy. Yet, on this day, I was tethered quickly from display to display and floor to floor, pulled by laughter and horseplay.

I don't judge those kids. I'm almost positive, at that age, I would have moved just as quickly, with just as little desire to understand these static displays of a history I knew from movies and actors. But it made me think of age and eyes and the cartography of time, of how our eyes change, of how they hold the same objects in such different esteem depending on station in life. Where when our own book of history has a history, perhaps then, we relate to what history holds, when we know the turns and decisions and choices we made, and their consequences, and we know these things not from a book, or a lecture, or a parent, but we know them by divorce, by losing a job, by the unexpected and premature death of loved ones, when the dawn of our life is now pursuing dusk and we stand on the deck of our house and realize, maybe for the first time, that night is coming and it cannot be stopped. Perhaps then, our eyes change. Perhaps then, we ask questions not asked before and a jousting tournament is something more than just a jousting tournament.

adrift

I lie in my ocean
my bed
adrift

hazy in morning mind
unfettered
of the day

spinning freely
I watch
equally amazed

and terrified
this thing
moving

so swiftly
within me
so effortlessly

and I wonder
with fear
at it

and at what
is observing
it

because there is
a doing
and a watching

and it is
in
me

this duality
and I cannot
tell

if it means me
health
or harm

I cannot tell
if what
is two

should
be
one

if
what is
fractured

was
once
whole

if somehow
I am
broken

bread of life (for Barb and The Cause)

Cancer took my father
My aunt, so far,
has held her own
and between the two
between here and heaven
lies an infinity

of the pain of chemo
and the purchase of hats
of nausea and weight loss
and the residence of fear
where tremulous hands
speak for silent tongues

but above all,
as a lone trumpet
holding a solitary note,
there is the call
to compassion
to commitment

to community
and courage;
cancer calls
to give what we can
when would we could
change time

would we could
control fate
and right wrong
and paint
the sky blue
the grass green

it calls,
even when love
is all
that remains
to
give

to hold
in our hearts
the depths of
our deepest well
of bucket full
water pure

as we hold the hands
with yellow wristbands
and look into eyes
that need us now
as we need them
as seed needs soil

realizing not
they return to us
as the fallowed field sowed
a harvest vast
of golden wheat
this bread of life

of courage
character
grace
and love
forever expanding
forever divine

nouns and verbs

I am English. She is French.

And neither one of us can understand the other.

On the surface of language. That poser of reality. Of communication.

We have moved through this gossamer illusion of nouns and verbs.

And those lying adjectives.

To the typography of shoulders and arms and feet.

Eyes become stars.

Fingers our caravans.

And sapient tongues learn to swim in the sea of pores.

As rain to dry soil.

The lightning of touch.

The diction of intent.

Beyond event.

Beyond fact.

__________


Lips in flight.

Billowy gondolas.

Riding the furnace of breath.

Colliding as arms into jackets.

Rushing to stave the cold.

To return to a place without eyes.

And float.

__________

And standing as trees.

Arms vining.

Nostrils flaring of fruit.

Heavy.

Ripe.

_________

In this way.

We speak the language.

Before language.

In the act before all acts.

To create nouns.

With verbs.

sensual musings

If I give you a pen, will you write me a poem? I want to see how you hold the sacred instrument, how your fingers flute the shaft, the angle of your nib on vellum. I want to watch you calligraphy ink in graceful loops and elegant lines, to know the choreography of your forearm and elbow and shoulder flowing before the wavering reflections of your bluish-gray eyes. And I want to stand behind you, my nose on your ear, breathing your thoughts, as you feel mine, growing, asking, begging to write its own verse.

Upon your page I spill my ink, my vowels, my alliterations arcing alabaster across your dewy wildflowers and wanton waterfalls and whiskey lips whispering for willow. I will make you say verbs and then pronouns, loudly.

Write to me of ecstasy with your ten nibs. Write of plums and figs and the evening fragrance of sun soaked orchards. Tell me of rain and mist in the mountains and of rainbows underwater in clear streams. I want to know of maple and sap and fingers that glisten mature joy. And give to my audience of pores, your tongue; and suck of my skin, slowly, as a snail after the rain. Scent me your need, flower me your bloom, gift me your pearl. Be my flag, undulating in my sighs, into the night of candles and parchment sealed in wax.

I want to hear you say that with your lips pressed against mine and your fingers in my hair. I want to stare into your lakes of fire flickering a lust I've never known.

and drown in the depths of your desire, consumed of heat. Immolate me. Wilt me. Turn me to mist, to smoke, to a happy consumption.

Upon white linens, with my finger and thumb, I deflowered it. Inhaling the afternoon, filling my lungs with wind and rain and sun; and my lips with the sweetest perfume. Then I took the stem with a single thorn and pricked my finger. And painted hearts upon porcelain skin heaving a sea I was determined to sail.

and lay with me, after the storm, in waters calm. Dress me in the silk of your hair and hold my joy in your smile as we let our tributaries flow as one river.

Sleep nude. Crenel my merlon. Drape your head upon the shelf of my shoulder and whisper words wanton and wicked to send me to slumber; or plunder.

I see your kettle gently smoking. The fragrance of warm tea perfuming the air. And I want to pour the cane of my sugar upon your heat and dissolve into your mysteries. Smelt me. Into the air. And let my sweetness be as fingers on the wind and those that pass will know of a union beyond instinct, beyond the delights of the warm commerce.

I want you in public, someplace where we could be heard. And here, in this place of skirt and button and pearl, I have this desire to bend you over and make you hold your lust with silent lips. As a ship at night in a pounding sea. Your gusting sighs on edge of waking the crew. Your tremulous need as wet as the deck. Your hair, my rope. Your thigh, my wheel. Hold the rail. Curl your fingers around the shaft. Knuckles white, nails red. Your back undulating in quiet urge, hunger, rhythm. This is how I want you.

1944 (autumn eyes)

I volunteered. Medical supplies were needed at battalion and the evacuation hospital was near. I saw her first there, in hospital, in profile, standing over a patient. She turned her head, looked in my direction, looking pass me. This first image, in my mind even now like a photograph. That pert diminutive feminine nose, her blossomed lips, firm in youth, slightly parted. And those eyes of fall. Those gibbous autumn eyes, flecked of golden hazel, inlaid in polished marble. That smooth curve of iris rising, holding the intensity of a hundred days within the dime of her eye. Like daybreak. Like sweaters sitting on a bench before the medallions of fall. And a sadness, as if not of this place, not of this ward of silent prayers and mumbles of mother, of lost boys and stoic men, of women with hearts poured empty, of faces blank in survival, of hands rich in the blood of so many, so many faces flowing like the slow shutter blur of a photograph. This is how I remember her, that first time.

___________

ed note: same scene from the third person


He stepped from the jeep into the slurry snow, pulled his collar up, rubbed his hands, and gazed upward to words engraved in french. The evacuation hospital looked more like the schoolhouse it was. Instead of buses, there were ambulances and trucks and not a few jeeps. The deep green painted doors of the old building were as the banks of a narrowing river of men, the flotsam of litters carried faster and faster toward the entrance, men hanging on with the white grip of a raft in rapids.

Supplies were needed. He was doing what had to be done. Still, he was here and not there, not at the front. Everywhere was mud and slush and urgent unshaven faces dirty of soil upturned, as dirty as volunteering to go to the rear. He loitered. A little longer than necessary before the doors, school doors, a place of children as perhaps it was still, as perhaps he was, as perhaps the lingering ache in his gut of a time long ago, of a time longed for, of a place not of this place, where children ran and laughed and death unknown, all of life immortal.

Through the doors a stairway to the right. Black iron rail and the smell of, the hint of, real or imagined he could not determine, of blackboards and chalk, of uniforms new, pressed, and smelling of spring, of mom. He climbed a flight of stairs to the main floor, to what appeared to be a commons, filled with other uniforms; and cots, not desks; and charts, not notebooks. And her.

Corinthian chestnut hair, hazel eyes, muted red lips full of benediction, of blessing, the red of christmas coming, of mistletoe. She was a descant chord rising among the orchestra of tuning bodies, heard by eye, as music seen, as poetry in a sea of prose. And from a distance, in the realm of magic, of the universe expanding, of sunrise and rain and rocking chairs on old porches, of canoes in clear streams and silent paddles dipping, tilling a child between generations, as a grandson and grandfather, wordlessly in heaven of old denim and railroad caps, of tobacco chewed and shoes worn leather cracked and laced tight, he saw her standing there, in profile, of a book he wanted to read, to write, to call his own, to call theirs.

Seattle

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1944 (coats)

Stillness
Irrevocable stillness
Irretrievable stillness
A coat no longer breathing
Eyes open but no longer seeing
Legs meant for running, lying limp

In the quiet of warmness
of a life not yet cooled to death
of pages empty, fluttering away blank
forever blanc
of no reason
wordless quiet
heart pounding silence
of a mind racing to find a path
that no longer exists

You never get used to it
You never become numb to it
You never accept it
The innocent loss
of innocence lost
of an anger that burns
as acid
from inside

where there is no house
with enough walls
to punch
and there is no other
above
that answers anything
anymore

But there is standing
as the warmth of life
slowly fades
as sunlight behind clouds
as clouds full of rain
of tears that bleed
a heart dry

leather dry
cracked leather dry
of a slight breeze
a stirring of dust
a setting sun
and an anger beyond
biblical tales

So we stand before these
bloody coats
of hair groomed to kiss
of hands that would hold if they could
of eyes that would raise a child
to shoulders strong
and run through the house
on a trail of laughter

And we stand on hard ground
of snow falling
nature's coat
upon our fallen
and no cold known to any foxhole
cools what burns inside

1944 (around the edges)

Letters arrive from home. I've stopped opening them as too I've stopped sending them. I'm tired of talking around the edges. How can I go home when I can't even write of it? How can I face those eyes when I've seen so many here? How can I want this child so much yet disown my own lineage?

And what do I say of his father? I feel a boy within me. Protected from this war by the membrane of my belly, by the fortune of eighteen years. To feel this life inside while seeing so much death outside is like standing in the dark of a full moon. And what of me when they know. What then?

__________

There is the sound of kicking, of my feet against the hull, my back in a life-raft. I see faces on deck, mostly disinterested and the muted sounds of a party, of laughter dissipating in the wind. The sun is setting and I'm drifting away. Sleepy on the lapping lullaby of the ocean. This is how it feels. Drifting away. Alone.

___________

Maria

Four pounds of wasting muscle
of hair long for the groomer
she'll never see

her teeth gone of age
and her museum spine
clothed in thinning skin.

A fiery throat of bile
upon the night
and
upon the morn

chicken and rice
returned in puddles
mixed of medicine
smelling of hell
on the stairs.

Still she breaths
and in her eyes
that proverbial light
asking not of mercy
but only love

as the time comes
near
when love is all
there is to give.

1944 (all the meadow)

I held his head to my chest
and wondered if always
it could be
as now,
his fragrant hair
all the meadow
I'd ever need

I traced the outline of his ear
that fleshy question mark
and between my fingers
smooth as nickel
rubbed his thumb-flat lobe
for luck

Nestled among my curves
like valley river mist
his breath gently
soughed warm humidity
as I hoped
one day
his namesake would

And could I would
nourish this circle
pert my roseate buds
aching my want and need
to give and be given
to nurture and nurse

and grow the strapping fields
lean and lithe
to the sun
hard as hammer
upon the nail
brave as farmer
before the plow
bright as eyes
within a poem

a lifetime lived
when we were whole
and our limbs full
of dreams
and each other
as I held his head
to my chest

1944 (bows of red)

Our pale blue sky
winter's endless dome
infinite as heaven
bears the distant sun, harsh

upon forest deep firs
whippoorwill tight
their royal winter coats
sparkling of snow

we pull
sharp winter air
like knifes
into our lungs

cutting them
with each dry inhale
and of frosty exhaust
exhale our reply

out and upward
steaming forth
as trucks too
snort into the bitterness

arriving in procession
mumbling in shivering idle
their cold cargo
awaiting bearers

and men
that can walk
unload men
that cannot

from my tent I watch
morning wind
lightly twirling
fresh snow

across the open field
whipping
snapping
muddy heels

urgent
so urgent
these worn
wet heels

soft
like slippers
in the
snow

bringing
our presents
wool wrapped gifts
in bows
of red limbs.

__________

pale blue boys
dressed in heavenly crimson
supine smiles
of gaunt ivory
and river swollen tongues
overflowing lips
drooling tributaries
eroding muddy canyons
down unshaven faces

our boys I watch
arrive as harvest
stacked like wheat
unloaded as wood
cut down
they lie
before these aged firs
looking up
with gray eyes
our boys
beyond the forests
beyond the skies

1944 (nothing left)

Kate, I need help. (heavy sigh, slight pause) I'm asking for help.

What's wrong?

I'm at my breaking point . . . (inaudible)

Slow down.

Everything. Everything's wrong.

Talk to me.

I've got nothing left. (pause) There is nothing in reserve.

We're all running on fumes Mary.

Really?

Yeah.

Are you pregnant?

Are you?

I don't know.

What do you mean you don't know.

I don't know what I have done.

What does that mean?

(crying)

Talk to me Mary.

I don't want it to be like this.

Like what sweetie?

This pain. Inside.

Show me.

I didn't know Kate.

Didn't know what?

I've been sick. Everyday. And I've done some things.

What kind of things?

Things you're not suppose to do.

Like what?

I don't know.

I can't help you if you won't tell me.

You couldn't help me if I did.

__________

When your head is thrust underwater, you can think only of air, of breathing again. There are no other thoughts. No other concerns. Just air. Just breathing. Everything else fades as night before dawn.

__________

We are on the move again. Our life is packing and unpacking. Nothing is permanent.

__________

I want to write home. I want to connect to a past I imagine better than this eternal darkness. But there is no bridge. And what looks so pleasant from the distance of time, shimmers like the mirage I know it to be.

__________

I have my bedroll. Some clothes. His journal. And I want for nothing else. Nothing more. Not even joy.

__________

No sooner than we unpack, set up the tents, brace ourselves for more carnage, the order arrives to pack. We are advancing.

__________

The towns seem as a blur. So do the days. And the faces.

1944 (tanks)

You feel it first in the ribs. A tickling vibration. Then the ground clamors before you see them, these roving juddering leviathans, rumbling like buildings broken loose from their foundations. Sherman tanks, unbuttoned. Covered in sandbags. Leather heads popping from hatches like nervous gophers from their holes. I wondered how many we'd see, returned to us by truck, unloaded on stretchers. Their waves and smiles as gone as the arm or leg or legs they were missing. And I wondered too, how many we'd never see again, outside of a photograph. And if upon this day, someone back home felt ill at ease around the dinner table, or watching a sunset over the mountains from a front porch, rocking the day into night. Just the rocking and the crickets and maybe a few lightning bugs.

They tear up the narrow village roads with their steel tracks, the fetid smell of fuel, of exhaust in the pre-dawn mist, of ruddy lives within those olive drab coffins. We've seen our share of burned out hulks pushed to the side of the road and we've seen the burned out bodies smoking from the fire of recent battle. Like blackened mummies failing to escape, bent from hatch, fingers clawed, faces fixed in rictus agony. They say smell holds the high ground in memory. I won't argue the point.

As quick as they come, they're gone. The jarring, however, remains. As if your bones are still resonating of some deep frequency. Even today, some twenty years later, I still feel those juddering clanking tanks, still see those ruddy fresh boys, in the memory of my spine. You feel it like an ache before a change in pressure. And you stare at your cup of coffee, waiting for the ripples. But there are no ripples. Those tanks aren't coming, no more than those boys are coming back. So it feels, caught in the crease of a memory, in that darkness of yesteryear, of a time you'd rather not speak about.

___________

I died a little bit today. But not beyond the threshold of pain. His memory leaves me like the tide. And what washes anew is not the same. My eyelids at night, flash with the lightning of my dreams and my head aches with its thunder. My nights are this way. Lost on the ocean, riding the swells to nausea; and when I wake, the sheets are wet. And I smell the stale stench of sweat.