When I was a boy,

two dark bookcases stood in the hallway

that ran through the center of the house.

At the end of one of the bottom shelves

was a history of the 5th Marine Division.

My father's name appeared nowhere

but among the long roster in the back.

I used to sit for hours under a small lamp

and search the ship and battle photos

for a face that might be his.

All my father ever said was--

"I never killed anyone. I drove a truck."

It was not until years after his death

that an uncle mentioned in passing

that my father had driven ammo

from the black beaches of Iwo Jima

to those who has moved inland,

where death disguised itself

as blasted rock and ground,

where the Japanese were like shadows

moving inside shadows.

Manila 1945

Over ale and squid,

he tells me this story,

without elaboration:

"Our bulldozers pushed

the broken buildings

from the downtown streets.

Our dead had been dug out,

and the gunfire had moved

up into the hills

more than half a mile

from the new quartermaster HQ.

About a block away,

they threw up a mess hall,

and every day going to lunch,

we passed this one heap of brick

pushed off the road,

waiting to be hauled away.

At about eye level,

there was a Jap arm

hanging out of the brick

from just above the elbow.

I don't know why

but every day for about a week,

I shook his hand."

Rabaul

Designed to withstand the fury

of a great assault borne up the gray channels

of the Bismarck Sea,

defended by soldiers,

sailors, and airmen of hardened confidence,

of the ardor that welcomes

the blood offerings which victory

requires of valor,

it was denied its heroic confrontation--

bypassed by MacArthur and Nimitz,

outflanked after the long exercise of carnage

had spent itself in the jungles

of the Solomons and New Guinea.

Instead, the heroes of the early sun

gave themselves up in a grim ritual of attrition.

The boldest airmen found diminishing solace

in their inevitable flaming out,

as instincts tested beyond articulation

became inconsequential

and all that remained of honor

was avoidance of dishonor.

The ships below

scattered, the white of their wakes

tracing the soul-dulling cycle

of their escape from "safe harbor"

to the empty refuge of the open sea.

And on the island itself

those in the bunkers dug ever deeper

as the droning bombers

pulverized the remnants of what had been

blasted away after the surface itself

had been blasted to a lunar desolation.

At regular intervals,

the survivors regather at a bare shrine

and leave their frail offerings

of red blossoms and paper prayers.

In the underworld of the barge caves

move the descendants of the first men,

who passed in their great canoes

beyond the yearnings of their epoch.

These pass like shadows

from one rusting hulk to another.

They carry long bamboo poles

strung with snares that seize the bats

roosting where quiet has settled

in the long abandonment of sorrows.

Anecdotal Lives

The first and the last time I really talked

to my cousin Jimmy

was at the Ukrainian Hall on River Street

at his nephew Eddie's wedding.

Jimmy was older than my old man

and a cousin four- or five-times-removed,

depending on who I asked.

He was wearing a maroon-plaid suit

and a tie with a purple palm tree on it.

We were drinking seven-and-sevens

to the quick polkas

that the women were dancing to.

He told me

how the German had somehow

gotten out of the locked boxcar;

how he had shouted for him to stop;

how the other Germans in the boxcar

had shouted more loudly

again and again and again--

how the sentry farther down the track

had turned,

had lifted his rifle to his shoulder

and shouted something

that the German running straight for him

either did not

or preferred not to hear,

though he must have understood

as the shot was squeezed off

and the bullet closed the space

between them

much faster than he ever could have.

He told me

how the Germans in the boxcar

had fallen quiet

not when the gun had fired

but the moment after

when the German had stopped

dead in his steps

and then had lifted off his feet

as if someone had struck him

square in the heart with a club;

how that night they had not

unlocked the cars

because there was no transport

available for prisoners

and no place to take them

without trucks;

how the next morning

the sentry had reported

a quiet night

and slid the door open

for a captain

who had said "J-e-s-u-s"

like someone had just ripped his guts;

how they had found all of them

frozen,

grayer than winter,

colder than the morning cold;

how they all had come to look

and had looked for longer

than they should have been allowed

to look;

how more than a decade later

in a quiet bar

in the middle of an afternoon

in Newark, New Jersey,

a GI's former German bride

had told him

that Tote den Verrater!

meant

"Kill the traitor!"

I know now that my cousin Jimmy

was already dying of a cancer

that would eat away his insides

faster than anyone but him

could admit believing.

They laid him out

in the maroon-plaid suit,

but his wife had substituted

a plain red tie

for the one with palm tree

the color

of certain sunsets

over the anthracite mountains.

After the War Was Over

I took down the map of the world

which I had pieced together

from large maps of each continent.

It had covered most of one bedroom wall,

and each night I had moved

the colored tacks by which I tracked

the gains and losses of ground

announced on that night’s news.

My grandfather looked at all the tack holes

and started to talk about replastering.

I sat at the foot of my bed

and found myself trying to count the holes

as though I were a tired soldier

attempting to preserve the sound

of each bullet that had not killed me.

Why I Cannot Look at a Picture of Benito Mussolini

His biographer tells us

that in 1926

a crazy Irish woman

named Violet Gibson

went to Italy

determined to kill

either the Pope or Mussolini.

By chance, she came within

an arm's length of the Duce,

pulled out her revolver,

and squeezed off a shot

before being subdued.

Because he had tossed back

his head in his usual way,

to favor the crowd

with an imperial profile,

the bullet passed,

not into his brain,

but through his nose.

We are told that,

seizing the moment,

he remarked,

"Fancy, a woman."

We are told that,

after his nose was bandaged,

he resumed his passage

through the crowd,

like Caesar merely nicked

by Brutus.

We are told that,

as a gesture of goodwill,

he later ordered

she be released quietly

to the British.

Yet we are not told

what happened to her then,

nor how the hole

in the Duce's nose

came to heal so well

that we who depend on pictures

never could have known.

Private Longings,

I. Munich 1929

The boy who loved Eva Braun

knew only that she enjoyed fresh fruit.

After the grocer closed the shutters,

the boy would sweep the soiled sawdust

to the shoe-worn center of the floor--

could lose himself in the recollection

of her teeth breaking the apple's skin,

the crisp sound and her smile as she chewed

rewarding the devotion in his selection.

On the day that she stopped coming,

he told himself that she would come the next,

but his dreams that night were full

of vacant faces gathering at windows.

II. The Ukraine 1944

In the miles on ten of miles of mud

on every side, there was always

the weariness that seemed to bring

into the lungs all the odors of terror.

The grocer's boy had acquired scars,

the grim humor that embraces death

to hold off the awful fear of its moment.

Sometimes in the chill quiet,

he would tell the others about the girl

who did not care that as she chewed

the apple's juice dribbled on her chin.

In return, they would offer him stories,

epic misadventures that would by chance

return them to each other at war's end.

Ordnance

A dairy cow explodes

in a pasture in Provence--

disappears as cow

in the crackling flash,

becomes in the instant

carnage,

crow-feed,

raw stuff of soil

to be dispersed into grass

and then digested into cow.

From the fragments,

the experts determine

it was a German grenade.

Though it may have lain there

the fifty years,

it seems more likely that,

buried once,

it had worked its way slowly

back to the surface--

where history gives way again

to story, and where wonder,

in some sudden voice,

survives its circumstance.

The Camp Survivors

Those who heard the boot knock

of stormtroopers on the stairs

have survived to find their hearts

still beating in the darkness

where damaged dreams collect

like bodies in remote gullies.

Those who hear, in the cold

accents of policy, the wearied tread

of human hope herded still

before the club and the bayonet,

must find in the enduring need

for their grim testimony

the darkest irony

of their long survival.

Homely Metaphors for Slaughter

The axles of Assyrian chariots

turned long, curved blades

that cut through enemy foot soldiers

and horsemen and horses

like the food processor

goes through cabbage.

No, for though the cabbage bleeds,

we call its lifeblood juice

and simply wipe it up.

For it is not the deep red

of carnage, of agonies

beyond the bloody record,

beyond the catalog and count.

For if a headless man becomes

but briefly a fountain of gore,

a headless cabbage is but

a bare patch of ground.

Two millennia later,

in the Great War,

men ran bent forward

with their bayonets pointing upward,

like blades of grass

to be mown down by machine guns.

And, indeed, the figure

does make one reconsider

the violence done to grass

in the name of lawns--

does make one wonder

whether we might keep our children

always small

by lopping off their heads.

As we have kept our young men

always young.

Back