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Winter
for my mother Henji
I can’t remember her smell anymore,
just the winter that followed her –
the yard in Ohio red with oak leaves,
scraping of the rake,
frost whitening the windows.
Mom hated snow.
Bundled me like a package
and sent me out to play.
Later in the kitchen she scolded
my wet and muddy boots.
At the end she gripped my hand,
wedded it to hers for days
and I gave her my silence like a vow.
Night before the last she sat up
singing every corny song in her repertoire.
First flash of morning her eyes glazed
moving from one world to another.
She was a traveler then.
I leaned over the bed
and kissed her mouth, still warm,
pushing air from her rattling throat.
She took what love she could still feel
with her, leaving me
a prism of light in the cold.
Between
Us
for
Elijah, who enlisted to play in the army band
after
three draft notices, hoping to avoid Viet Nam
No matter how many stories you
tell, how many poems
you write about Viet Nam, the boys who became lost
soldiers
crawling through jungles, returning from the bush
with that wild and empty look, surprised to be alive,
who found comfort in music and heroin, pure cut,
about the mama-sans dutifully emptying barrels of
GI shit,
teenage prostitutes, farm girls really, and the line
of GIs,
about bunkers built on graves, ghosts rising in rice
paddies beyond,
endless guard duty patrolling the perimeter with a
semi-automatic
and too tight boots, listening for any sound in the
wire,
the silence of an ammo dump with enough TNT to blow
a small village,
about a boy crossing a swamp on a water buffalo,
War Dog who guarded you, who never barked, the comfort
of his growl,
his silent pant as you searched the northern sky to
find home;
no matter how many times you describe the starkness
of the land
after a bomb, the 120 degree heat that tugged at your
skin,
the relentless monsoon as if it were trying to wash
the war away,
the absurdity of soldiers as bandsmen preparing for
a concert
that would never be played, marching through potholes,
transported in a giant helicopter with a hatch that
severed a leg once,
helicopters that could be shot down every single time;
no matter how many words you use to evoke those images,
I can only listen as your tongue spills out each syllable,
forming landscapes where a young soldier, harnessed
to a rifle
and a clarinet, steps deliberately, searching for
the reason
he was yanked out of school, then returned to a place
where life somehow continued, where no one, nothing
waited,
as if that boy would never return, and he never really
did.
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