I saw what my
father’s eyes looked like staring at death ten years before I was born
My younger brother
sat in a hospital emergency ward behind walls monitored by doctors
Thought about by
my parents and me
Mother on her way
to the social worker’s office
Father stares back
at me saying I did not want to go to Vietnam
Tears seeping,
shaking, glaring tangential to me as if back in time of a high school bedroom
Thinking about the
effects of smoking marijuana, music, and a life with my mother
Juxtaposed and a
way out from Agent Orange and the Viet Cong gong
Sounding off in an
electrical apprenticeship, hard wiring for hard work
Three kids later
and almost forty years and leaking out in a waiting room
Death peeking at
the obliteration of my existence through my father out in a rice patty
Like his father
seeing the man next to him shot to death in the Philippines
Grandpa was
feeding a machine-gun ammunition, now slipping behind the barrel
To make
non-existent other men’s children, as if the bullets were anti-spermatozoa
Canceling out
family trees like Monsanto round-up to the roots to complement
The defoliation
pumping up a stock-price in the tangerine-dream skies
Shifting the
cellular make-up of gonads and prisms of the Purple Heart hanging on my
grandmother’s wall
And my father’s
father dead at fifty from the metal-shrapnel in his body leaching into
Alzheimer’s
Wandering around
Westwego Louisiana searching for apples in a drugstore with the pharmacist
Calling my
grandmother, “Joe’s over here again.” And she says, “Thanks for getting that
for me.”
As she loads him
back not knowing the word of what to call the price a man pays for his country
Flag over the
casket and my father the third to pall-bear the class that he did not have to
go
He did not have to
go and so, we are here in this waiting room as lives attempt to consume
Tomorrows borrowed
from another’s choices, the universe speaking in the whispers
Of just how
quickly the wind can call a boy to say he is seventy-seven years old
Depending on how
one is counting or today is October 31st or December 25th
To know the moment
when you thought, you thought you had time to see the sunrise part
The nights of
dreams of becoming husband, father and living further than the older
No man should have
to watch his son be laid to dust, screaming inward and the hallows eve is numb
The words retreat
into lucid thought that time is melting into a thaw
Certitude that a
man must find sufficient rest to do sufficient work
Provider, farmer,
writer, painter, singer hands on the wire, the pen, the brush, the string
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