Swimming After Trout
The sun prickles me,
and the dock creaks, rocking
on algae-spotted Styrofoam.
A silvery leap spatters
this drowsy morning,
now tail-thrashed alert
as trout flee weed beds
and sunken logs
for spring-fed depths—
far from the snaking neck
and strut and stalk
of a great blue heron.
My toes line the edge
of wave-slapped wood,
and I dive, in an arc,
into the current,
plunging below
tepid-safe waters,
desiring mute green
until the cool presses
hard on my breast,
and I push upward,
bursting into air,
a gasp of joy.
My Father on D-Day and Mountain Shade
They said the LST rode higher
in the water when landing in trim,
and on a stomach-churning morning,
she hit the beach slope; the bow door fell,
disgorging jeeps and tanks and finally us;
It was gray all around—the water, the sky
the ships, as far as I could see, the one time
I looked back, and then only forward.
They made movies of our memories,
of what they thought they were:
German mortar and exploding artillery,
the strewn wreckage of flipped, ripped jeeps,
of wire, of bodies, whole, some with faces yet,
of twitching pieces, arms here and legs flung there,
of middle parts oozing guts—the sea foams,
so does blood. Then my hands did the thinking,
and doing, on semi-automatic,
what the doctor ordered: stanch bleeding,
apply dressing, sprinkle sulfa power
(the lone wound antiseptic) and dwindle
the morphine on who has the best chance;
the hands became the machine that patched
the broken living, passing them to other hands
that stretchered them up the ramp.
I paused later—at the strangeness of it all.
Why Omaha? A city in a golden-prairie ocean.
Why Utah? A landlocked state with a salt lake.
But this Omaha, this Utah, opened to a dead sea
where boys stepped off Higgins boats,
murdered by their gear.
I saw, in a blind moment,
north Georgia mountain shade—
and tulip poplars growing straight,
their futures in coffins.
“Their wood is best,” said Lem Moss, maker
of final boxes, “fast growing and long-lived.”
When did coffins become caskets?
“Jewelry is for caskets,” said my mother,
midwife and layer out of the dead,
giving up a bedsheet to line
somebody else’s sleep, east-facing,
because that’s the way it was always done.
She held them at their beginning
and at their end—I was the lucky one,
finally home, for that long in between
when she held me in the mountain shade
one more time, many times over:
the boy, the man, the graying son.
© 2021, from Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel
The New Orange
In the dead of August, yellowing leaves scuttle Alabama yards unready for rakes—autumn’s casual brush-by, a 68-degree flirt with sweater weather after a fine rain. In a deeper south, the Amazon burns; the slideshow plays a frame or two on a small screen until swiped by android thumbs tracking the points of the Dow jagging red.
Rainforest palms fan their last against dusky pumpkin skies—“smelling like barbecue,” say journalists. “What?” wonder the casual. “The whole hog pit-roasted over hickory and drizzled with vinegar? Mustard and paprika-heated dry rub powdered with garlic, brown sugar, and allspice? Smoked chicken sweating peppery mayonnaise?”
Ceramic tile chills my feet, and I grope for an orange shrinking in the refrigerator bin. Memory peels back to frosty mornings when I rode with my father to the farmers market in Birmingham’s West End. Fires burned in rusting drums, and we huddled, waiting for citrus hauled from groves where seasons went green year-round.
Blast furnaces cast a tangerine glow until dawn streaked, and the sun flashed rigs bearing exotics with names to dream on. Valencia, Indian River, Satsuma, and Seville took the choke out of those sulfur days, the never-letup of iron-smelting. Now he’s gone. The forests are going. We arrive—where nothing ambrosial stays.
© 2022, from Eunoia Review