Three Shorter Poems

Jonah Raskin wrote:

Thanks for the blog. I enjoyed reading your very fine and moving poems.
Jonah


Daughters: Two Ways of Not Knowing

The first involves millions of my
sperm and unknown women
thousands of miles away, three decades past.

The other, my known daughter, the one I claimed
abandoned me when she was twelve. But how
can a child leave her father? Most would say
it had to be the other way around. Surely,
I the father, a different sort of child,
mistook AWOL for desertion. When I did not
bring her back, was I the abandoner?

I could not know a child I never fathomed
who may beg barefooted, tough,
on the streets of Saigon or who,
if mine, is riddled with wrongs, angry
without a father, tortured.

I knew a daughter I lost
and a daughter I hope never existed.
There are things some fathers may never know
except through dwelling in anguish.

Invisible



How could I know what to do for you
if I could not see you,  little you,
quiet as a caterpillar?

You were the ghost born of a dead union.
Did I walk out past you
or through you like an open door?

And later when you materialized before me, the apparition of you, 
the reality of your skin, your hair, your eyes, 
your intellect, your heart, your beauty,

I found you as a glorified butterfly,
and you
hadn't even noticed the caterpillar.

The Poet As Survivor Assistance Officer

(from Bringing Back the Bones)

II.

Years pass back and forth like seconds used to:
Now the keyboard keys click open
the month of April 2004…
another linking back to Vietnam
a panoply of vibrant color
shrouding boxed lifeless bodies
“the flower of our youth”
blossoming red, white, and blue
stars and stripes and endless
row on row of more and more
flown again to Dover, Delaware
an endless procession with
no beginning or end of days…
…at least, this time
the bones are boxed not bagged
are colored not blackened
are draped not slung.
I want to see  I want you to see
I want my country to see
I want these colors of war seen
I want to see the bodies in the boxes
with the flags of freedom’s colors
I want to see, I want the president to see
I want every body every  BODY to see
every body what his caprice has caused to cease
to be even the memory of what we once were and were to be.

3 Poems

The Notion of Wings

It’s the notion of
wings, that’s what it is
More like flight the concept
or flying, a verb
Have you ever flown a verb?
Poets and lovers fly verbs all the time.
It’s the exhilaration, that’s what it is
straddling the latest verb soaring
bareback rider rodeoing space
landing with a thud, hard realization
rodeoing now requires redoing.
Shake off the stardust, mount up anew.
It’s the notion of wings and flying the verbs
That’s what it is.

Polyandry

To remember is to reassemble what has fallen apart.
Your father’s attempts to flesh out your mother  fail.

He would need to collect her missing parts;
Such recollection is well beyond him.

Instead he looks to you who resembles her
Imagining that you embody her.

It is, after all, a wife he now seeks;
He tells you that you are his wife now.

To you this smacks of  the polyandry
When one wife cares for several husbands.

Reminding him about your husband
Fails to impress him since

To re-mind implies recreating a mind long gone.
You have your hands full enough with one spouse

Not to mention with a dependent father
Who seeks such an unwelcome arrangement.