LaJean awakens
like a small bird, sure of its surroundings.
There are things in rows, cherished things
each with its own name, for LaJean
has no faith in numbers.
If anything is out of place
with tender firmness she restores it.
LaJean moves through the day
with silent grace, a dance with no beat.
She does not impose order, but discovers
the secret desire within the heart of things.
Rows and boxes are LaJean's
love song to the universe.
If there is darkness in LaJean's world
it also has its place upon the shelf
where she lovingly dusts it
every month, and fondles
the memories which it evokes.
We have been together too long
you are too solid to me
like the world, and I forget
that it is magic
holds your atoms together
and dances in the vibrations
of small dust motes in the air. It is good
you leave sometimes.
I inventory
the tokens you have collected
to surround and illuminate
your soul
The next time I look upon you my glance
will shiver
I will wonder
what hidden merit I have
to bring you thus gladly home.
Waiting for your return I count
the things you treasure.
Pretty stones, a small pressed flower
matchbooks from a trip you took
when you were younger and unschooled
in the wider world.
Silk
fits you nicely and you touch
everything you love
with an aura
of bitter-sweet memory.
nothing
is ever lost
The campfire
gives more heat than light.
You sit on the other side
wrapped in a silence
as smoky and dark
as your old flannel shirt.
| place love notes carefully | |
| where I find them by chance | |
| whisper love songs softly | |
| in the private ear of my heart. |
ii
The campfire is dying.
I add another stick.
The night glows dark.
You make a speech
of no words, placing with great care
wood sap chips, pitchybark, needles
at the fire's edge,
a wordless speech of
pine scent
embers
and thin blue smoke.
The fire crackles
sparks scatter across the night's edge.
iii
The first day was hard.
On the second we find our stride
swinging gracefully
walk a long way.
There are many wild flowers
alpine mosses
and snowbanks carved by the sun.
iv
Up here the eye sees fifty miles
sees a hundred rocky peaks and no trees
scans a multitude of lakes at one glance.
Dizzy with height and fear
you don't stop to look.
the emptiness below
is hungry for you,
reaches out
draws you to it.
v
On down the slope,
rain.
A long hillside with no shelter,
clear but for stunted sagebrush,
damp clothes, one small fir.
The fir gives us welcome.
It won't keep us dry forever.
We hurry on down the trail.
Sun returns; the last huge drops
fall gemlike against the blueness
hang glinting in rows beside the trail.
vi
By the lake where many
horses have been tied
we share
a pan of rah min
and cashews the chipmunk left.
In distant years I will see
where his teeth undid my pack
think of you here, the trail,
this patch of sun by the lake.
vii
Long thin
hungry trout splash
in the icy lake.
Alice Lake gives us dinner,
then trout for our breakfast
while the first stars appear,
thin and sharp-edged.
There is home in a blue spiral
smoke through dark firs
campfire and smells of frying fish.
viii
At midday
the warm sun makes
old needles rise in vapors
reminiscent of strawberries
after a rain.
We rest and talk
of the trail winding under rocks
and through damp brush meadows.
ix
We finish our tea
pour the water out
on the dying embers.
A cloud of steam
carries dark ashes high.
I stir the fire
we shoulder our packs
turn our backs
on the small cold spot
burnt by fire,
needle-bed faintly disturbed
beside the trail.
The line stretches to eternity, young and old
trying to understand what can never be explained.
The ground dips, carries us deep into our emotions,
until we are buried in the shards of our memories,
the polished stone a tide of names we pray we don't know,
a tide of memories we dare not acknowledge; scents, sounds,
anger,
So much anger, fear turned to anger, incomprehension turned to
anger
-- When will this wound ever heal?
She touches the stone, my student: her father
his name is here, until now unseen
by mother, sisters, or herself,
loathe to admit he could have died
in such a place, with none of his women
to bathe his body in the healing balm of tears.
She sheds one now, a single tear,
wipes clean her own print, to honor
his remembered rectitude by leaving no smudge
of her own curiosity, curiosity
about her sorrow, and that of her mother and sisters,
and how they could carry this wound, bleeding
more warmly than any issue of their loins
so long without tending it -- and each other.
I want to touch her, to hold her, to comfort her
-- but I do not. Her sorrow is too distant for any touch;
her sorrow is too private for any consolation
or to be mingled coarsely with this too-public place,
this wound in the proud, militant breast of America.
My own sorrow is separate.
I lost no father in 1968,
nor any brother of flesh or spirit.
In 1968 I cruised a different sea, fueling the fleet
and the pride of American power in this, the American Century.
In 1968 I wore a peace symbol on the inner lining
of my officer's uniform cap,
hung psychedelic posters on my locker door,
carried in my wallet a newspaper clipping:
"Far to the south, U.S. Navy jets
destroyed three enemy ox carts."
In 1968 marijuana smoke drifted from every hatch
and every supply room of that broken Navy
and we all day-dreamed of hopes and interrupted plans
hopes and plans we could no longer remember
nor understand; and we stumbled along a precipice
between these, our brothers in the war zone
who murdered and went silently mad before being killed
or sent home in ruins, and those, our brothers "Back Home,"
who started careers, built solid suburban lives,
made fortunes, paid for the war we all hated,
and mocked our inability to get out of this hell.
I search the stone panels in vain for the names
of my loss, of my grief, names I do not expect to find
-- for who would dare inscribe this wall of death
with those words? Hope, Trust, Fidelity, Youthful Idealism
that once flowed from the heart of a generation betrayed
then ignominiously honored in false shows of cold war patriotism
and now lie as dead as any man here named.
Sixties rock thunders incongruously in the background
while an almost familiar voice threatens
"Never again shall we enter a war
unless we are ready to go all the way.
Next time -- all the way, or nothing."
And squadrons of motorcycle vets hurl curses
at a man who wished war neither on them, nor on himself.
I am sickened by it, by the noise, by the ambivalent solemnity
by the endless flow of people, reliving now and forever
the most terrible moments of their lives.
My nostrils search vainly for the pungent-sweet smoke:
My eyes search vainly for day-glo clothing, for peace symbols.
I search vainly for any memorial of that other war,
of the devastation it wrought on us and on our dreams.
The Memorial to the Unknown War:
Surrounded by day-glo bunting,
flags bearing fifty white doves, thirteen day-glo stripes
in all the colors of the rainbow,
Smoke rising in a thin wisp from the smoldering ash,
tight-rolled strawberry paper, pinched
in a giant bronzed alligator clip:
the eternal roach
Am I the only one who remembers that war?
This carnival sickens me. I am sickened by a nation
that can thus celebrate what it neither acknowledged nor
understood,
a memorial with no remembrance,
a wound with no healing,
a sin with no forgiveness,
a grief with no consolation.
I look for no modern Parzival
to stop this wound with the spear of its making,
nor to utter The Question that brings peace.
We shall never be blessed, never in this time:
and this wall, with the eternal theater of crowds,
of mourners and celebrants and demagogues
shall memorialize nothing -- so much as our own damnation.
Epilogue: The Poet Contemplates His Own Soul
Standing before the wall, writing this poem,
confronting the wall and the pain that does not lie
buried there (nor can it be memorialized there or anywhere)
I am dismayed at my own temerity, to write this poem,
I who could neither face honorable exile, jail,
the anonymous martyrdom of a just refusal,
nor share with these, the men betrayed by their own generation
the terror and ambiguity of this century's bloody misadventures.
This wall, the moral struggles it neither acknowledges nor
judges,
judges me, confronts me, demands of me:
Witness, why art thou silent?
But what testimonial may I give, what witness bear
to a question that had no answer,
a guilt that can have no expiation?
And so I stand benumbed before a granite wall, a wall of names
with no meaning except the men who died, men named here
and in the uncomprehending hearts of all who pass hereby,
mourning a private loss, contemplating a public failure.
And I call upon them, upon you, upon myself, to witness
that it was neither the unjust war nor the bootless defeat
that marks the tragedy of that long decade,
but the abandonment of ideals:
ideals lost neither in the jungles of 'Nam,
nor in the smoke and rage of urban streets,
but in the forgetfulness of inconstant and timid hearts.
Thus I accuse.
Thus I confess.
Thus I witness.