-for Tom 

As soon as his plane lands,
he calls home from a payphone.
Hi Mom, he says. Dead silence.
Who is this? she asks. He laughs.
Your son. I just got back
to the states from Vietnam.

My son is dead, she says.
He was killed in action.
He’s a war hero.  He orders
a Miller High Life. The bearded
bartender spits on his Army
uniform and the crowd cheers.

While he is treating soldiers
who lose their limbs and minds,
the government loses his paperwork
and reports him presumed dead, 
his commanding officer tells him.

When he arrives home, his black lab
licks his face and his mother watches
him sleep as she did when he was a kid. 
A reporter asks: Where you been?
As the barber cuts his hair, he says:
Aren’t you that soldier on the news?

As they smoke Lucky Strikes
and drink Guinness draught 
at Paddy’s Pub on Broadway,
his best friends, Top Dog
and Big Dog buy a round
for the house for War Dog
back from the dead.

For a dead guy you look 
pretty good, Big Dog says.
It was a great memorial service, 
says Top Dog. The whole school
showed up. You were more popular
dead than you ever were alive.

He and the war are soon forgotten.
No one knows who he is as he pumps
gas and clerks in convenience stores,
eats stale donuts and scorched hot dogs,
buys a twelve pack of the cheapest
beer and squats in vacant houses.

No one hears him mumbling: Why
didn’t I die? Why couldn’t I save them?
No one recognizes him in the court
ordered rehab centers where he bides
his time until he is free to drink again.

That is the only service he will have.
When he dies alone in his sixties, 
there are no headlines or breaking news.
No military shots or salutes.
No wife, children or grandchildren.

His brother scatters his ashes 
on the slope where they ski 
before the war took him away.
                        

-for Bob

Says he is the sports editor
who hangs out with me
at Maloney’s Bar after work

where we drink Olympia 
from the tap and play pin ball
and then walk across the street 

to M&Ms Bar and Café
for eggs over easy and coffee.
It is two am and 44 below zero

and my 1956 Ford Thunderbird
won’t start and he has locked his keys
in his 1961 Chevy Impala. He kicks

in the window and his car chokes
and coughs but finally starts
and we slide over icy streets.

As he walks me to my door, I slip
on the slick sidewalk and he steadies
me with his burly body, stable

as a barn, and I fall foolishly in love,
breaking the rules of our friendship,
since he has a fiancée in the Midwest.

When he flies off on vacation
and returns with his bride, I end
our friendship and leave town.

I thought I’d never see you again,
he writes, but I googled another Sharon
and your name popped up. 

When we are two twenty somethings 
tapping on typewriters, we have no clue
that we will reconnect on computers,

almost six decades later as wise
white owls with soulmates,
and realize we both made the right decision.
                        

The one who clips coupons
and designs and sews 
her own clothes and vacuums
her one-bedroom apartment
on the top floor of the high rise
all hours of the day and night
and sees a psychiatrist
once a week for her OCD,
the girlfriend who rescues
my suicidal cat when it tries
to jump off the window ledge
and drives me in her reliable car
to bail out my impounded junker, 
because she thinks I am his 
down and out former co-worker.
The girlfriend who buys a gun
when she goes through the garbage
and finds his love letter to me
begging me to move to Washington
saying she was just a summer fling.
By then I am on my way to Yakima
praying the junker doesn’t break
down, the cat doesn’t jump
out of the car window,
the job offer still stands
and his girlfriend stays in Seattle.