Two Poems (July 20, 2009. Issue 7.)

"Why Are We In Vietnam?"

We’re in the mood that brought us to power,
when we knew we were no longer loved.

There were mobiles dangling, leaflets floating
everywhere. Our thoughts always lead

to that rooftop where the eleventh-hour criminals
were bound. The absenteenth of november it was

and thirty days that hath no number is April Jane.
The portals of infection were there, the slave ways

and the slaughterhouse manners, the way
we remember, now we’re gone.

We are in our second madness now

and no longer take the aggrieved as they are.
They are still soldiers in the void.

Of self and soul there is no reunion, but one
interminable meeting.

We should pay our respects, we should claim
responsibility—gather our children, our

scatterbrains, or forever leave them laughing.
To be grounded forever, or twisted free.

That’s all that a batch of leaflets can say—
a gobbet of warm words, a last fistful bursting in air.

March First

I’m snowblind in Tennessee,
wearing sunglasses indoors
like a half-dead celebrity,
and the noonday world
lies stunned in white light.
I have Whitney’s Star Finder
for a visor, a night
of breaking glass for a cowl.
I wait for dusk when the snow
will turn blue, when the sun
going down is a shriveled orange.
A bluish night on white ground
should be seen in God’s
good time, midnight and after.
Hildegard and her hundred cats
may howl about eternity,
for there will be fire
in the heavens, like Christmas
in Stalingrad—heiliger nacht—
time for all trekkers in the snow
to end their winter campaigns,
their woes just begun.