What war meant to me:
staying in school
keeping your deferment,
my father and I, who never
talked to one another about our lives,
staring at the screen when an image appeared from
“The March on the Pentagon,”
shots of protestors, a gesturing spokesman,
a “We Won’t Go” sign –
Dad said, “Oh, that’s last weekend…”
“I was there.”
“I thought you might be.”
No further exchange of views
followed
Dad never spoke of his war
until his final decade
Even when my older cousins marveled
over the souvenir German rifle in the basement
the story
was like pulling the dragon’s teeth
 
I had secrets of my own
When the Selective Service mailed my punitive
reclassification notice to the parental home address,
Dad threw me an anxious glance
“Don’t tell me you’ve gotten yourself
in trouble with those people!”
I denied it, like the cowardly apostle
at the crucifixion
 
The truth was,
both like and unlike Dad, I would never share
my story with my family:
I had.
                        

Love the Earth
Keep a bird and learn how to fly
Write a love letter to a person you’ve never told
     you love (right, I bet I’ll do that)
Grow something
Do the thing you’ve put off every damn day
     since you first thought ‘I’ve gotta…’ –
Yeah, I have a list for that too
 
Learn to scold like a crow,
an animal with an agenda,
or suck life from the ground like
a rodent with a signal-system fluffy tail,
natives with an equal claim on the environment you purport to love,
jail-rioters of earth’s surface tension
keeping the plant population under the feeder down
 
Worship the early perennials,
the first of that faithful army
who each year remake the Earth
inside us
 
Today is beautiful –
Damn! Actually, any day is beautiful
My advice, Self, is get your fanny out of doors
and worship the elements as thyself
as you, and all your ancestors,
once did
Sacrifice, that is, at least an hour or two
to the feel of time passing
 
to wandering, looking about, feeling the season…
and, dammit, we have things to do.
 
*Title is borrowed from the song of that name by Chequerboard
                        

I want:
to relive each day
to grow no older
to love everyone I ever met
as if theirs were the most desirable soul in the universe
 
To rewind all the memory traces
     back to the places
where the memories are made,
like hot buns from the oven,
or bagels maybe, scooped from boiling foam
or shared pizzas, dogs at our feet
waiting for the bones of ideas,
on the long march to the last frontier
from nowhere to everywhere
 
Among so many wants:
to sit in the sun of another star
and call out, with loving knowledge,
the elemental virtues of all the souls I have known
    or, perhaps, possessed within my own
as they flash by on their own reborning journey
     to those other places, other times
in the gratified universes of which all knowledge
is elemental, elementary, and wholly unpossessed
 
*After the instrumental song of this title by Tears for Fears