Fog Galleon

      Horse-headed clouds, flags

      & pennants tied to black

      Smokestacks in swamp mist.

      From the quick green calm

      Some nocturnal bird calls

      Ship ahoy, ship ahoy!

      I press against the taxicab

      Window. I’m back here, interfaced

      With a dead phosphorescence;

      The whole town smells

      Like the world’s oldest anger.

      Scabrous residue hunkers down under

      Sulfur & dioxide, waiting

      For sunrise, like cargo

      On a phantom ship outside Gaul.

      Cool glass against my cheek

      Pulls me from the black schooner

      On a timeless sea—everything

      Dwarfed beneath the papermill

      Lights blinking behind the cloudy

      Commerce of wheels, of chemicals

      That turn workers into pulp

      When they fall into vats

      Of steamy serenity.

At the Screen Door

      Just before sunlight

      Burns off morning fog.

      Is it her, will she know

      What I’ve seen & done,

      How my boots leave little grave-stone

      Shapes in the wet dirt,

      That I’m no longer light

      On my feet, there’s a rock

      In my belly? It weighs

      As much as the story

      Paul told me, moving ahead

      Like it knows my heart.

      Is this the same story

      That sent him to a padded cell?

      After all the men he’d killed in Korea

      & on his first tour in Vietnam,

      Someone tracked him down.

      The Spec 4 he ordered

      Into a tunnel in Cu Chi

      Now waited for him behind

      The screen door, a sunset

      In his eyes, a dead man

      Wearing his teenage son’s face.

      The scream that leaped

      Out of Paul’s mouth

      Wasn’t his, not this decorated

      Hero. The figure standing there

      Wasn’t his son. Who is it

      Waiting for me, a tall shadow

      Unlit in the doorway, no more

      Than an outline of the past?

      I drop the duffle bag

      & run before I know it,

      Running toward her, the only one

      I couldn’t have surprised,

      Who’d be here at daybreak

      Watching a new day stumble

      Through a whiplash of grass

      Like a man drunk on the rage

      Of being alive.

Moonshine

      Drunken laughter escapes

      Behind the fence woven

      With honeysuckle, up to where

      I stand. Daddy’s running-buddy,

      Carson, is beside