Wartime

Courtship in Wartime

May 1951–November 1952

My father was drafted and sent to Germany.

He wrote my mother letters complaining about warm

beer, enclosing photographs picturing snow-covered Bavarian castles.

His rival, Don, enlisted and got sent to Korea,

sending home letters filled with horror, fear, death.

Mother chose my father, the castles and beer—

there would be time later for horror and death.

Prejudice

Poets create . . . like diviners and soothsayers, who also say many fine things but do not understand their meaning.

—Plato

I don’t like a poet with small soft hands whose verse pretends more than he understands,

who’s written only the sort of poems that never leave home without their combs—

a sandaled poet (wearing slacks, I suppose) who carries an umbrella but can’t write prose.

I like a poet in boots, whose lines are stones no one mistakes for shrines—

a large-handed man with a battered thumb (the nail gone black, the rest gone numb),

who lays down words like bricks in a row and never says what he doesn’t know.

Job’s Dream

I dreamt I was Jehovah’s mutt, gnawing the bone of some mistake, waiting for Him to scold, make me beg, speak, roll over,

or perhaps, finding me diverting myself with power drill, tax form, violin, order me to play dead or dance for a tossed treat . . .

Shaking the sleep from my eyes, the dream from my head, I remember that “creation is templed,” turn toward the miracle of breakfast.