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Immanence
Antebellum Plantation, Stone Mountain Park, Georgia

We leave the one-room schoolhouse
with the double meaning of its woodenness
spelled out in ranks of hair-shirt oaken
benches and plank-top desks without a blemish
of utility. No inkwells, no pencil minders to give
them purpose. It is a place of the truly elementary— 
of bone-tired inertia and of rote, and educative homilies
about the patriot saints. On the slatted wall
above the teacher’s desk, the Father of His Country
still presides from the unfinished portrait
by Gilbert Stuart. Disembodied head, dead white
on a black ground of rusty satin. It speaks to dark eternity,
bright virtue: the mythic cherry tree; the bitter winter
of faithfulness, Philadelphia locked up like an English gaol;
the patience to stick till the screw turned tight
at Yorktown. Did the hardness or the homilies prepare
those boys of 1850 for Sunday strolls to come,
ranked like Continentals, into the rifle’s obliterating jaws?
 
My wife has four-leaf clover on her mind.
I’ve never seen one, and she abhors the vacuum
of my skepticism. She prays that God will let us find
this unicorn of flora, and as we walk the well-groomed lawn,
she plucks one up, a tiny Intercession. Yet there’s another:
I stoop, incredulous, and here it is, the four plump lobes
like the fingers of a cartoon hand. I laugh the sinner’s
incongruous guffaw, while she thanks God, He
who helps our unbelief. I think how I want to be with her
when lightning X-rays open spaces, or the car knifes
across four lanes of highway, the shattering median,
the onrushing flail of steel. Then I recall those war-
dead Southern boys, bent to their hard-assed catechism,
their Calvinist Lives of the Saints— 
three hundred thousand war-dead boys.
 
For now, I take my little cache of Immanence
and press it in a book, a fragile homily
between the pages of a novel, nouvel, new.
 
First appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review
 


Death Sentence


He drives a lonely stretch of road this evening
more alone, even in a lonely life,
than he has ever been. His God is become
Nietzschean, aloof, caught up in an endless train
of dialogue with Himself that starts
Let us make man but ends
in a chilly abdication among the stars.
 
This man’s world is shrunk to the breadth
of the car he drives, and the gray strip
he travels is its hopeless orbit of the dying sun.
The little he has ever known has been revoked,
according to the best medical evidence.
Restless and angry as he’s always been, he is here
to make his peace the only way he knows how.
 
He has refought the war so many times of late:
the tracers, napalm flares, white phosphorous
map the universe on the black bowl of his inner eye.
It is as if he is watching a planetarium show,
and the man who runs the show lies dead
at the controls, the machinery
wheeling and reeling without check.
In Country, you relearned the elemental truths:
everyone a gook, no man without sin, the heart
desperately wicked, the universe run wild.
Headlights come on. Cars pass by in the other lane
with the monotony of a litany, old words
strung together like gray beads on a chain.
He closes his eyes and ears to them.
Judgment now or later, it makes so little difference:
no man without sin, the heart desperately wicked.
He accelerates, turns the wheel,
crosses the center stripe into the other lane,
into the path of the enemy.
It is just another firefight, the casualties faceless,
to be numbered in the light of morning.
 
First appeared in Mandala
 
 
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Memorial
World War II Memorial opens on National Mall
                                    —News item, April 30, 2004
 
My Uncle Jack missed by twenty years
seeing a memorial sixty years in the making.
Maybe he would have felt it was his due,
like the free drinks he cadged
back in the ’40s, a newly wounded vet.
 
In those days he made this joke:
“If they tell me ‘Just drop your right eye
in the till,’ I got ’em there!” Uncle Sam
gave him a glass eye to replace
the good one he lost in Yugoslavia in ’44,
after two years slogging through North Africa,
up the boot of Italy. My mother told me
his men broke down and cried when he got hit.
 
Later, though, the most you could get out of him
was a grin and change of subject.
Bloodthirsty as kids are, I once asked,
“Uncle Jack, did you kill a lot of Germans?”
“Literally thousands!” he answered, beaming.
And that was all. Nice weather, if it don’t rain.
 
What I heard about his tour came secondhand.
The Silver Star that should have been
a Medal of Honor, the lieutenancy he passed up.
“Sarge” was a good enough handle for him.
Once, Mom told me about the time
his company took out a machinegun nest.
Among the “thousands” of Germans
that he’d killed were the boys he saw
lying there as if asleep: blond, clean-cut,
hard-bodied as quarterbacks. They weren’t the Enemy
that day. Just sons and brothers.
And a kind of beauty you didn’t learn about
in boot camp. That day, his famed right eye
did what glass can’t ever.
 
First appeared in Möbius