by Stephen Mead.
“Good Morning Vietnam” the theatre marquee read.
I could see it between these porch beams & our neighbors roofs.
It takes awhile to sink in, twenty years or more back then, to bring the war home,
let the unmentionable surface for what it was, was not & will forever more be: both.
Earlier that day I took a walk to hear a lecture at a downtown museum.
Nobody else came. They locked the doors.
I turned around, went to the library,
got a book, then stood outside to catch a bus.
I waited 38 minutes, thumbing through Snodgrass, W.D.
Occasionally a passerby, once even a carful,
slowed to shout remarks.
Was it the way that I stood, the cut
of my hair, a bird’s nest.
Most likely my shoes were the culprits,
a pair of hand-painted old loafers.
I was told to get new ones yet didn’t have the cash.
Instead, midnight blue brushed
light strokes of white, pale
jade, a clear varnish.
Not exactly wild or overt,
any more than a pigeon is unless
scrutinized, they suddenly became an issue,
my very presence a kind of controversy,
though not to the young street kids
jiggling rows of pay phones.
Back home I put the political footwear
in a closet, & found a sharp piece of glass
in my sock. It had been there right along.
Lucky, wasn’t it, that I didn’t get cut?
Lucky, I said again, aloud to you,
knowing being made fun of by strangers was a flea bite
compared to the front lines in your gaze
or the phantom limb throbbing where your knee cap just stopped.
I touched it there on this porch which became a pier.
A mild rain was falling, the ocean, farther on, drawing surf,
sending it back, a resurgence for us too,
damp & alive in the beach grass,
that Vetch, Campion, Pitchwort, Brome—–
all a language of their own,
immemorial,
fox glove for fox holes the wind has chiseled on flesh.