May 2015
Kimberly Blaeser
kblaeser@uwm.edu
kblaeser@uwm.edu
As poet, photographer, and professor (not to mention wife, mother, and sometimes activist), I spend my life in an endless balancing act. I was recently appointed Wisconsin Poet Laureate and will hold that post through 2016. My teaching is in Creative Writing, Native American Literature, and American Nature Writing at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My publications include three collections of poetry: Apprenticed to Justice, Absentee Indians and Other Poems, and Trailing You. I am also the author of the scholarly monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, and the editor of Stories Migrating Home: A Collection of Anishinaabe Prose and Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. My current creative project features “Picto-Poems” and brings my nature and wildlife photography together with poetry to explore intersecting ideas about Native place, nature, preservation, and spiritual sustenance. For more information about my work, please visit www.kblaeser.org.
MIA, Foreign and Domestic
He was perpetually missing
when I grew up.
My Uncle Clifford,
lost somewhere
between the life boat
and his downed ship.
“He made it out,”
reported his boyhood friend
turned military comrade.
“But he turned back
went searching, I guess,
for our missing men.”
I still see him swimming
long stroke after long stroke
arrowing toward the horizon
of some far off ocean.
Propelled away
by that Antell trait--
is it pride or compassion?
that keeps getting us
into trouble
generation after generation.
And the veteran who returns
recites the melancholy story
at Kohler’s tavern
on Friday nights,
a pack of Pall Malls rolled up
in the white t-shirt sleeve
of the arm that raises his glass:
“And I never saw him again,”
he lies
as the memory of Clifford Antell
parks himself on the stool
at the far end of the bar.
He was that stranger’s head
half turned away in a crowd
somehow familiar.
The man I would walk toward
heart-thumping
already reaching out to tap
the shoulder of his navy seaman’s jacket.
The one whose turning
full face
always meant disillusionment.
Even though the white cross
was placed over an empty grave
before I was born
and stone was carved
1925-1943
to enclose him,
I still regularly brought him home
as a valiant POW,
as fresh-faced hero
newly recovered from amnesia.
But I have since learned
that no injury or war
could cause any of us to forget
the names and stories that made us,
and that my Uncle Clifford
is still out there somewhere
swimming between a sinking ship
and a lifeboat
with destiny tucked
like a limp body
beneath one arm.
-from Apprenticed to Justice, (Salt Publishing, 2007)
He was perpetually missing
when I grew up.
My Uncle Clifford,
lost somewhere
between the life boat
and his downed ship.
“He made it out,”
reported his boyhood friend
turned military comrade.
“But he turned back
went searching, I guess,
for our missing men.”
I still see him swimming
long stroke after long stroke
arrowing toward the horizon
of some far off ocean.
Propelled away
by that Antell trait--
is it pride or compassion?
that keeps getting us
into trouble
generation after generation.
And the veteran who returns
recites the melancholy story
at Kohler’s tavern
on Friday nights,
a pack of Pall Malls rolled up
in the white t-shirt sleeve
of the arm that raises his glass:
“And I never saw him again,”
he lies
as the memory of Clifford Antell
parks himself on the stool
at the far end of the bar.
He was that stranger’s head
half turned away in a crowd
somehow familiar.
The man I would walk toward
heart-thumping
already reaching out to tap
the shoulder of his navy seaman’s jacket.
The one whose turning
full face
always meant disillusionment.
Even though the white cross
was placed over an empty grave
before I was born
and stone was carved
1925-1943
to enclose him,
I still regularly brought him home
as a valiant POW,
as fresh-faced hero
newly recovered from amnesia.
But I have since learned
that no injury or war
could cause any of us to forget
the names and stories that made us,
and that my Uncle Clifford
is still out there somewhere
swimming between a sinking ship
and a lifeboat
with destiny tucked
like a limp body
beneath one arm.
-from Apprenticed to Justice, (Salt Publishing, 2007)
©2015 Kimberly Blaeser