In the old French barracks, shelvings of cots
No ventilation – that was for officers
The night was hot, wet; sleep was difficult
No one knew anyone or anything

A siren. Life paused. Should we do something?
We barefooted outside in our skivvies
Hot. Silent. Still. Stuffy. Respirations
Is this a false alarm? Is it over now?

BLAM!
                                
Boom. BOOM! Boom-boom-boom-boom. BOOM!

And during a pause

a small voice said, “I don’t think they want us here.”

Outside with the dogs for their night patrol
A bright flashlight for fear of wild winter wolves
Death-singing from the tree-line beyond the field -
My little dogs bark boldly, but stay close

They’re never permitted beyond the fence
That Hadrian’s Wall of doggylization
Through which they plot escape on sunny days
But not on this wolf-howling moonlit night

Better to have a chew-toy than to be one
So with them I close the door against the dark

A Manifesto Against Manifestos

          “You can silence me, but you can never convince me”
                    -graffiti on a bulkhead in Viet-Nam

I am not woke; I am awake. No one
Commands me how to see and think and write
I am not one of The Masses.  I am.
I am not one of The People.  I am.

I choose as my teachers Dostoyevsky
And Byron, too, and Shelley, Keats, and Waugh
Ahkmatova, Shakespeare, Chesterton, and Lewis -
Not some embalm’ed face upon a screen

I am not obedient, and no one
Commands me how to see and think and write

For Thomas V. Morris and William J. Bennett
In gratitude for a wonderful summer at Notre Dame



O, thou dry Jansenist! A night of fire
Left in your pocket like a shopping list
Sitting quietly in a room, will never burn
To set your sere and withered soul alight

And one might wager that your calculator
In brass, for counting brass, touches not the heart
Which has its reasons which the mind knows too
Pensees which never make a night a day

Forgive thou, then, this lettre provinciale
And count it as a friend’s memorial