Paul Granger’s Wound


You were the smallest, Paul — 
the shortest, leanest, blondest, bravest 
in our crew — and you have retreated less far 
into darkness. I remember the day 
that would etch your wound into my mind, 
each catch and notch of memory glistening 
with your blood. There was bright sunlight 
and deep blue sky    a blaze of white roses 
and the dark gray haze of the new state road 
the highway commission had bulldozed 
into our lives.  
                     You were wearing a round-necked 
polo shirt and rolled-up jeans, a black leather belt 
and high-backed sneakers. Zigzag stripes crested 
on your chest in vertical waves that flowed 
from neck to groin: a map of some watery terrain 
no friend or parent could decipher. I remember 
how the dark blue denim rippled over your thighs, 
the lapping rivulets at your knees, the way 
your gold-brown hair was parted. 
                                                 At our water hole 
between parkway and woods, your clothes dropped off 
and you dove into the cold spring water all of us knew 
to be sacred: a dark pool released from the dictates 
of nature    where we could breathe without constraint    
without the harsh odor of fear stinging our nostrils. 
You dove and we cheered, living for the moment 
in the rare oxygen of the underlife you had plunged into    
feeling again the icy waters of time wash over us. 

And then you broke the spell, bursting the surface 
as you held up your hand, gashed open with that raw 
diagonal slash that even now, five decades later, 
wildly pulses — that wound written deep in your flesh 
with the jagged edge of glass from a smashed beer bottle — 
your ruined hand held up for us to witness 
in all its bloody splendor    your wound, Paul: the sky 
ripped open just when we needed it whole.   





Through the Ice, 1953
              in memory of Skipper Broich


I think of you now: how your short life ended, 
as if on schedule. While you lived, 
something invisible seemed to batter you — 

a demon or force field that smashed you 
against every wall. Yet it’s not the car crashes 
or concussions I recall 

but a scene, like a circle of ice, sawn 
from the frozen past, its edges jagged, its hues, 
even then, minimal, now bleached to a dwindling fire 

of colors. Do you remember how you almost died
late on that winter evening? how the thin crust 
of blacker ice broke under you 

and you dropped in the dark so deep on your downward journey?  
We’d been coasting all day on some white-dark hill 
between trees that brushed our faces 

and were walking quickly toward the shortcut 
through the woods that lay on the bank of the lake 
we trekked over like travelers in the Arctic.  

In our triple-knotted boots, our wool scarves 
and scuffed bomber jackets, we trudged toward home, 
toward the dim light over familiar doorways 

and the rich aromas of food our mothers cooked 
at the first tinge of twilight. The January sun sank 
in slow gradations, each slight hint of darkening a tick 

on the clock of childhood. Skipper, you must have been 
more hungry, more tired, or just plain younger, 
and ran ahead of us to where the thin fabric of ice 

ripped into sheer strips of translucent frost.
Shocked to stillness, we held back, then rushed 
to where you’d vanished    and then returned.

It must have been your brother who calmed you, 
who begged you to settle deeper into coldness, 
to trust his high and broken voice. Yes, 

it must have been Dave who promised 
we’d rescue you, who slid his Red Ranger sled 
into that gaping hole in the universe   

where it found your hands.





Two Boys at the Seashore


They live in a desert of strangeness,
step lively on a strung wire of dreams
that sways dangerously above the sea brine.
Like firewalkers, they cross where only faith
can navigate. Ignorant of lethal winds,
tsunamis; gawky, white-blond, and nearly
hairless; their boxer swim trunks
are all that distinguish them from figures
drawn in sand.
                     A sudden gust
off the wave crests is reason to run:
quick quick quick quick quick — sandpipers.
A shadow at the shoreline is where-to-dig:
dark, wet, gritty, yielding, without
bottom. Sand is to scatter, not to protect,
and energy is what grows luminous
on their bodies: sheen over burned skin,
aura over pallor.
                        They mine the beach
for treasure, move in a haze of friendship
and unknowing. Green trunks and red,
they disappear slowly, dissolve into purple
blackness, into seagrape air, at the horizon.
What is left are hieroglyphs: tracks
of sea ducks, sanderlings, oyster catchers,
plovers, phalaropes, turnstones — 

Shadows caught in flight, let them be gathered
like shore birds wading tidepools of sun.