he tells me dark secrets  
and paints colors on the shore
where the salt mist speaks to him
in voices heard no more  

along he wades, watching
the growing ground at his feet
careful to not crush creatures in the surf  
***** crawling to bed themselves
in their own tugging time
before the moon full tides  

slowly, he walks
as if one long step
might fling him into the abyss  
he does not fear the fall,  
he knows, it comes to all,
fishmongers and kings  
falcons with their mighty wings  
all share the descent, as the sea
turns from blue to black    

while I hide far inland
he paints me dark secrets
vanishing tracks in the sand,
and I long to hear his brush strokes,
to see what vast weary waves reveal,
through his teary eyes

I could say I understand
and I do say "I understand,"
with my Oscar winning voice
with my imploring eyes that ask you
for more, while subtly looking, at your crusted scars
I imagine some catatonic feline, curled
in your gut, waiting stoically to make the next cut
the next surgically precise silent scream
joined by other equally ferocious growls
that only you can hear, if you are lucky enough for them
to drown out the howls of your heaving heart
I can say "I know what you feel,"
you with your sacred steel
I can wipe the blood from your thighs
I can smell the stale silence of your cries
all the while looking through your soaking soul
mercilessly forgetting, your slicing red chants,
were meant to awaken a deaf mute world

Fifty years ago today

A half century. Yes--seems like a long time when we say it that way, sublimely forgetting time is a dimension we chop cheaply for convenience. In earth time, in galaxy time, the vast blue stretch since the cosmos’ first coding coughing of carbon, that five decades has been but a clipped comma in a thousand page tome, with a single stout capital letter being the history of a country, and a verbose sentence or two being the tale of our two legged species. For me, the 50 years since that day has been most of my book--nearly all that has been written since the dawn of light.

I was on the Kanto plains of Japan, so it was already Christmas--though I guess my world has always spun faster than most. During the night, my father had assembled my new black three speed 26 inch Raleigh English racer, a serious upgrade from my red 24 inch Schwinn, my first bike, long lost to spinning memory, and likely the property of some dump in the heartland.

The new bike stood beside the table in our large combination kitchen/dining room of our temporary officer quarters. I can’t recall if it was too cold to ride that day, but I probably ventured out, either in the real rays of the sun or in the land of imagination, the two being of equal measure in the realm of memory.

A month before, my father woke me with the news of Kennedy’s assassination. Like others who were old enough to remember, the events of that November day have much crisper edges than any other, including the Raleigh racer Christmas or any Christmas I can recollect.

Tomorrow is another Christmas. I won’t look at that day too much when I am walking in the park this afternoon, for tomorrow is not waiting for me at all. It will be there even if I am again dancing with stardust. More likely, I will be here, on the same rolling rock, eating the flesh of a fallen gobbler and making new memories I will recall only hazily in fifty hours. And if I were promised another fifty marching years, I might lament their passing before they arrived, knowing full well they too would be filled with forgetting.

well not really… though I told
every grinning green Catholic soul
at my school I did that and more

I did smell the wine on her breath
and watch her trip into the trailer  
her gown hitting the floor  
before she closed the door  
her body as white as the fake snow  
spitting onto the set, and
as cold perhaps

I was sixteen and she was fifty one  
this was my one and only, her last,  
flick, not fling, though I would have
cut off an arm for it to have been so  
not the arm she touched  
in our one immortal scene together…  
her electric hand,  
all the blond hairs on my forearm standing at attention  
me wondering if the camera caught
their helpless vertical veer  

it mattered not, most of the scene
landed not on the screen, but
the cutting room floor, my two lines slashed to one  
my 48 seconds with her shaved to 22

I did not cry when I heard she died,
twenty months later, but my lie seemed soiled  
once she was in the ground
I confessed to Father Ryan  
he was silent when
I asked what to tell  
the fools who believed  
the dying star lay with me  
simply because she said,  
“Call me Vivien, not Ms Leigh”

thirty years
since Mark gunned you down
thirty years, passed
like a long sleepless night
that ends with taunting morning light
no brilliant sunrise grandly pronouncing
a glorious new dawn of man
although that would have been your plan
with your entreaties to give peace a chance
and imagine, imagine, imagine

now I kneel in this rain gray park
like a reject from some holy ark
a pilgrim in doleful disappointed pose
after seeing what your earthly brothers chose
was not to imagine a world of peace and love
but to wear reality like a cast iron glove
making mockery of your martyred chants
proceeding like a billion scurrying ants
deaf to your childlike pleas

across the soaked soil where your ashes lay
yesterday and today…and tomorrow
I feel the soggy sorrow
that you would have felt
if you could still see
all the rage of humanity

I knew Pearl, comely, calm Pearl
eyes as blue as the skies
that warmed her sands
where we walked and talked
dreamed the days away
her voice so sweet on the Pacific winds
it made me forget about home
I was breaking daily bread
dipping it in the
yellow yolk promise of eggs
when little gunner Joe
said come down below
to see the kitty he found
crouched in the shadowed corner
no bigger than the rivets
get her some milk he said
when we placed the offering in front of her
she roared a lion’s roar…
and the roar kept coming
and the young living
thing
disappeared into the darkness...
the stench of smoke
the screeching screams
the fierce rocking of the hull
and blackness
which came too fast to touch
all spoke with equal madness
telling us doom
can come on a sunny Sunday morn
in Pearl’s land
falling,
is something we all know
in the flat land of dreams
in the lucky light of day, and
on that Sunday morn,
in the boiling bowels of our ship
slowly,
with some giant hand in command
the water, the water,
the water we all had grown to love
now taunting our feet,
then our knees
the pounding began
the eternal pounding
the pounding of the hopeful
in Pearl’s blue skies
and our pounding,
the pounding of the ******,
without any eyes
the water
now at our waists
now at our chests
and then only our frozen faces
against the hard steel that had been our home
had the last few breaths of air to breathe
heard the last few gasps of desperation
and the feeble futile pounding
of those in Pearl’s darkened sun…
now we rest in this sunken tomb
the guests roaming above
with cameras and tearless eyes
for they were not
the ones who heard our cries
those who did, do not return
for Pearl is no longer a sunny beach
and a stroll in a dream
but a place where the pounding started
and never stopped
and where the world changed forever
when the first bomb was dropped

the car seemed to be gliding on glass
the last inconvenient instant before impudent impact  
the mangled mass of metal and his black crisp body
a spectacle for the masses, all 4 of them  
2 volunteer fire fighters and 2 EMTs
later, his father, blind now in one eye
from America’s diabetes, had Ramona  
drive him to the spot, to the dead oak
as big around as an oil barrel  
dead long before Paul’s 1996 Ford Escort
decided to take a go at it  
daddy had to see the place  
that infinite space between  
yesterday and the tomorrow
that would never come, even though
he had already seen, through his one good eye
his boy’s charred carcass at the county morgue  
resting on a silver slab, the clean and cold bed  
where he would spend his last night
before the fiery furnace,
Ramona and he could keep his ashes
no need for a big service, no money for one either  
but Dub, “Paul's boss down to the auto parts store,”  
opened his wallet as wide as it would go
for the cremation and a nice urn  
Paul would be missed, by Daddy and Dub  
and once in a great while, in the fast and furious world
of the flat gray town where he lived and died  
someone would ask, whatever happened to
that old boy at the auto parts store  
the one who limped a bit as he walked,
the one who rarely talked but always
smiled through his yellow teeth
when he placed the goods carefully
on the counter

when I returned, things had changed  
while the wild white dogs still gnawed
at their prostrate prey, by the tracks we all cross,
they were larger, and raised their mongrel heads
only at the scent of me  
for I now could walk so I would not be seen  
or heard by their blue black tongues  
my children’s children were not there    
perhaps wandering in another's field
of dreams, with another’s eyes,
perchance another’s thumping heart  
all the homes were old, and smelled of the past, yet
the young ones inside were who I hoped they would be  
filled with the bright eyed promise of tomorrow  
though I tried to know them, they only smiled,  
spoke a language I could not understand,  
and left each morn without me, wandering
with the beggars and beasts, on trails I could not see  
the sun shone through every door  
sending shafts of light at my invisible feet  
without warming them or giving them
safe passage among the same old dogs
I longed to know, but who never saw me
again

my feet
are numb in my boots,
I have holes in my soles, the
brown water to my ankles
but it will not freeze  
filled with gun oil,
blood and drek

I am
not sure
when I slept last,
if I ever did  
the others are there,
their eyes closed  
some sleeping  
some trying to sleep  
some trying to awake,
though they will not  

we
have yet  
to throw their bodies
on the heap

all eyes
are closed in the trench
save mine, and the sergeant
who stands like a statue  
more still than the dead  
only his eyes move
back and forth  

when
I am not looking at the wire,
the rutted field, and the ridge
where the Germans also sleep,
breathing the same foul stench,
I close my eyes, though I do not sleep,
but think of home, of Irina
I see her eyes, not the sergeant’s
and wonder if they have been closed
like mama’s and papa’s
and those beside me

I ask
the sergeant if tomorrow will be
the white flag, when we and the Germans
can retrieve the dead, from the wires,
where they hang, starved naked apes…
and when the flares fire the night sky  
I see the reflection in their wide open eyes
like the glint of light on broken glass  

I cannot
close their eyes

all is still
except for the swimming rats
and the pyres that send curling smoke
into the gray sky--neither the rodents
nor the fires utter a sound  

the sun
is surely there, somewhere silently
making its arc in our pallid sky  
but the last time I saw it
was two mornings ago,
or three, or two

when it rose,
I felt it on my face  
through the caked mud,
and blood from Ivan,
who was shot through the neck
and fell on me, and I lay still
with him on top of me,
like a thick blanket
his warm life elixir
painting my helmet
and face red, him gasping softly,
though only a few seconds
until more rounds pocked his body,
a carcass by then,
but my salvation  

would I be
the sodden sack of flesh
that covers another?
would the one who hides
under me remember my name?
and recall that I was
his salvation,
though I only a breathless
monkey, with holes in my boots  
and a **** soiled uniform  

would he
walk bent over
with the blessed cane of age
and remember, all I had done
for him, by simply dying?

I am the age at which you died
no comely pictures immortalize me,
though I am not washed white with time
like you

a lone silver streak stripes my chin

many would say
you were too sensitive for this world
thus rushing your years
and guiding the barrel to your mouth

I would pit my pain
against your Nobel torments any day
if such things be a contest,
what is not, though
a rabid race to the grave?

but who would really win?
for your mother’s madness did not leave you
skittering around like a cat on a hot tin roof
and your father’s anvil hands
did not leave scarlet letters
on your skinny legs

excuse me then, if I don’t
grant you a capital letter in your name
excuse me if I don’t applaud your time in the ring
or say bravo to the iconoclast
for your sparse use of words
(though, “for sale, baby shoes, never worn” was…perfect)
excuse me if I don’t think your readable feasts
should be on everyman’s menu

you were but a man
who drank and ate and fought and ******
until you could no more and decided there was nothing left
I respect your triggered choice and do not call it craven
but janitors aren’t made legends
they just clean your brains
from the floor

I witness
the marching armies,
some trudging through the sludge of slaughter,
some gliding as if on polished glass  
others flying on sympathetic currents  
few faithfully, but ALL fatefully, moving
onward, to the deep sleep      

like a mute director in life’s one act play
I watch many in their final moments
some in stillness so sweet
my camera gently weeps ( though not I)  
others I record being ripped apart
in metal madness, yet
I don’t blink an eye
even while wiping the
blood from my hands        

you, Robert, music maker at heart,
meat cutter by trade, scored my lens  
leaving it forever altered
I knew you, a year younger than I,
I saw you, beaten down  
by the grave gravity
we cherish yet dread,
you, trudging through
the slaughter, one  
of the harshly humbled,
you, found the right rope  
and your wife found you
on a Sunday morning,
hanging
in the garage,
your letter to the world the clang
of the alarm that woke her  
and hastened her slow march
to the church, where other directors
took over the filming, and  
closed the curtain, after
the final choking act  

I cannot miss you  
I,
(who only wistfully recall
the millions of marchers near and far)  
felt your Sunday sojourn  
**** the air from my lungs
I can only be grateful  
your living and dying  
made me feel
the palled pain
and undying dread

she had an uncle who spent
twenty years in the ring,
landing solid blows until  
he landed
in a downtown Oakland hotel,
older than he, wrecking ball got it
in the dawn of the cyber age
but for ten droning years,
it was his cage

he never had a title shot
but he kept his belly full
and had cash for the women, the drink  
never drove a car, cabbies knew him
and knew the smell of gin meant
“keep the change”
  
when his legs got weak
and his left eye went to blur
the money stopped rolling in  
but he still thirsted for the gym, the gin
he got himself a gig at Big G’s  
just enough hours to clean out the showers,
to keep the johns from smelling of ****,  
and a few greenbacks comin’ his way  

he would end each day
alone in his room, inhaling the gloom  
that seeped over the transom  
like smoke from a smoldering fire  
but there was no fire left in the ancient hotel  
or Parrot’s burned up belly  
only fading memories
of a wounded warrior  
who taunted his opponents
by mimicking every word they said  
in the ring, where he earned a bird’s name  
but never its sweet song, before time
took its tattered toll

will I put lipstick on you  
when you lay still and silent
as the last morning
  
or will you pull the sheet
over my face gently  
with a surprised sense of relief  
when my final breath
marries the gray air
  
will it be in the room
where we slept
under the watchful eye
of children and grandchildren
their timeless images nailed to the walls  
ever present but mute
while they navigated worlds  
with horizons we would never see

or would it be in the
hallowed house of hospice
where palliative words like
“we will miss you”
“not long now,”
“you can go, it’s OK,”
float above the beds  
like birds stalled in flight  
riding unseen currents, but
soon to swoop down
to perch on mystic memories,
briefly,
before flying into
the karmic night

I do not know why you moved to this side  
long ago, before your city became a **** zone  
maybe you knew something I did not  
you knew many things I did not, which I discovered
when you politely corrected my grammar  
though it was my native tongue,
and one you learned reading our newspapers,
watching our television
listening, more carefully than most,
to what the gringos said  
you told me tales of the arena,
usually after dinner, on your back porch  
when the shadow of the mountain covered our houses
like a quiet blanket, blocking out the blistering heat
of the desert day  
you would offer me a soda, always  
before my questions began  
your civility was strange to me at first,
the adults in my family barked and cackled  
your words rolled out like sweet liquid  
and left me wanting more  
I never asked why you had no woman,
you were as handsome as any man I knew  
later, years later, years of name calling later
I guess I understood,  maybe
that was why you left your home  
though the blind blood of bigotry
ran freely on both sides of the Rio Grande
and I knew you to be courageous
for when you told me the stories,
as the desert sky became violet and cool,  
and the few cicadas began their song,  
you boasted not of your dangerous dance
in the packed dirt of the ring,
but of the art it took to silence the beast  
the lost look in its red *** eyes
and the silent sadness you felt  
as the crowd cheered
another beautiful death

“lets split this diner and have a beer”  
four coffees in an hour made the world
too awake for him  
we walked to the Pink Mule,
the first bar we saw  
he knew all of the bars--all bars knew him  
the bartender was Abraham
but looked like a Bob    
he had a bourbon poured before
Charles made it to the stool
and looked at me like I was a fool  
“a light beer”  
Bukowski didn’t bother to laugh
though I am sure the word “***”
was rolling around in his head  
looking for a place to get out  
he kept on about Selma,
sweet succulent Selma  
how anybody that hot
could rule the world  
dragging men around by their dongs  
without lifting a finger  
that is why the gods made wine, he said  
not for some sacrament for the holy humbled
but for men hunched over like balless beggars,
he said, when Abraham Bob  
filled his jigger a second, or fourth time  
men made that way by all the Selmas  
whose middle name had to be vexation  
a whiff of her could get you to take  
a **** job, where you spent the day
hunched over, hoping, she would be there
when you got home  
even if she was, you wouldn’t remember  
in the morning, when you would go back  
to the grinless grind, hunched over, hoping  
Selma would be your wine

the coffee flowed through tales of three lovers,
all dead now, somehow  
he managed to squeeze in a live one, number four,
over apple pie with melted cheese  
she was still coming around, usually after her AA meetings
helping him fill his apartment with Lucky Strike haze  
(only woman he knew who smoked unfiltered ****)  
he did not know why she watched him drink  
maybe he was her 40 days in the desert,
tempting her with the libations
she loved more than her own flesh,  
(her son in Waukegan with his sober dad)    
maybe he was her test, he didn’t give a **** he said  
she was quiet in his bed
often, like a thief in the night,
she would be gone when he woke in the morning  
a book or two missing, ones he had read
and filled with notes, some with pages torn out
that lined his walls, even his crapper he said  
where he could stand and drain his lizard
read Ezra Pound and Elliot and ask himself  
why the **** did those guys use so many words?  
when he ate the last crumbs of his pie, he told me
he meant to ask me the same question,
but the answer would be too long,
that I asked questions that did not need answers
I tried to tell him
I felt the same way, but
he fired up another Lucky Strike,
and asked for the check
which I would pay
and I knew, he would hear nothing
I had to say

my fingers, the same fingers
that played the guitar  
I mean look at your fingers,
the same fingers you licked
after getting the sticky pale red juice
from a cherry popsicle on them  
my fingers were dug into the tall grass
my mouth, the same mouth I kissed Amelia with,
the same mouth I ate hamburgers with,  
was pressed against the ground so tight
mud was getting stuck in my teeth
and my ears, the same ears
that heard my first sounds
were filled with colored noise, with black noise
with screaming from people I thought I knew
and those mortar and AK 47 rounds that came as fast as hail stones
and then those same ears started ringing,
but ringing is not the right ******* word
because it doesn’t sound like school bells
or phones you are eager to answer
and I can’t describe what is sounds like
and anybody who does wasn’t really there
but it is easy to say 45 years later it was
like something you knew, but you didn’t know
whatever it is you knew, and contradictions
are imperatives and declaratives, not interrogatives  
like the people of “the world” think they are  
and people of the world are filled with interrogatives
and you are filled with answers
that won’t come to your tongue
because you are still spitting out the ****
from the rice paddies and the lies you needed  
to keep you from sticking the barrel
in your own mouth, but they, those who weren’t there  
wanted to believe even more than you  
so they could still look at you without thinking
the blood on your hands, the blood coming from your lost limbs
the blood oozing into the mire in some script
the dead donor did not know--all that blood
could not be spilled in vain, though you knew it meant little
when you rinsed it from you boots,
or even when splattered in your face  
the same face that smiled for the little gray square
in the year book eighteen months before      
or maybe a million years ago
in the land of affluent aphorisms
and fingers on bra straps
rather than the rock and roll auto switch of your M-16
the fingers, the same fingers
that squeezed the trigger  
and killed something inside you
while the rounds sliced the exploding stinking air  
you were happy to silently breathe

he slammed his cup on the counter  
not to get anyone’s attention
though his cup was empty  
I couldn’t stop staring at his eyes  
of course they were bloodshot  
and of course he stank of nicotine
and of truth that he said could not be found
in the bottom of that coffee cup or bottle of gin  
though he ****** up both  like…
hell, I can’t compare it to anything  
and he would think a simile was a waste of words
he told me of a lover he once had, Elisa  
with hair so long she sat on it  
and a thirst as ravenous as his  
which led her to an alley in South Chicago
where the ***** or the H put her to sleep
for good, and how he buried her in Peoria
in a hard freeze, beside her brother
who got killed in Phu Bai, by “friendly fire”
but Bukowski laughed through his tears
when he heard that ****, “friendly fire”
and he filled his glass again,
with Bourbon I guess--I wasn’t at  Elisa’s
numb mother’s house that day
and when he lost another ****** lover
to a drunk driver, he didn’t say anything about irony  
just said, ****, it hurts to be close  
and he didn’t trust this happiness ****
because it didn’t last, but pain, hell,
you can count on that ******* and if he leaves,
you can make some up on your own…  
the waitress filled our cups to the top
so there was no space for the cream  
I sipped slowly to make room
he took a swig that had to scald his tongue
but I could not tell, for he was already on the death
of lover number three, sitting there with me  
waiting for him to stop the foul flow of truth