Poems for Persons of Interest

  Business Trip Sonnet I dreamt of you the other night, pretending this long week had ended, bringing me to you ahead of schedule. Soulful mending began at once, and that was but the preview of things to come. I kissed your beard, your face, your ears, and breathed a heavy sigh against your neck. Reliving every pore and place I’d known before restored me. Then I tensed. Awake. The glory gone with only walls, mute walls, surrounding heart and me and mind. And clinging here, the dream remains, enthralls me. Rapture, desire, frustration combine.             Frustration, and a burning need so deep,             I close my eyes and yearn to fall asleep.

  Polar Bear Watch A moment awake that feels like a dream soon turns to a dream: I dream I awake once again to the sound of whispers and shaking, zippers and mesh, the Greenlandic wind that freezes the fingers clenched hard in their gloves. We roll, you and I, at once to our feet– peer out of the tent to meet the bewildering beige of the night,   this dusk never ceasing, casting a haze of dim iron light on vast prairies desolate rolling beyond the daze of our sight. Behind is the sea that bathes in the dried- blood rust of the sky, glinting peach in the sun. We can’t look too long. Our vigilance calls our eyes to the hills. Hold still, and await the great thing that might come.   It’s silent, except for yipping– a fox– our shivering breath. I squint. Seem to see the pale speck of my death, imagine it stalking, slowly and sure. I blink, and it’s gone. We chat for an hour. There’s nothing. No one. To bed once again. I lie wide awake. Though nothing is near, we’ve stalked on...

  Fort Dix: The Man Above Me They tell me I was on the bottom bunk. They tell me I found him. They tell me I called for help and that he lived.   I have no argument with any of this.   The man above me has no face. No name I kept. Just a life I’m told continued because of me.   That first week took two others.   I know this the way you know something from a briefing, not from the ground.   One by hanging. The other no one ever said, or I have no place to put it.    They changed the cadre after that. New voices. New rotations. Every two weeks everything reset as if that might keep it from happening again.   Then came the stripes.     E1 to E3 by the end of basic. Brass teeth biting into a sleeve I hadn’t filled.   They pinned it on anyway.   A promotion for a man who isn’t here.   I wear it.    It fits like something issued to the wrong body, kept out of habit, out of respect for the one who earned it.  ...

  The Wearable Scrapbook Each piece of fabric keeps its secret now that the hands which stitched have been taken into time.   Pull round this shawl-blanket as something religious. That patch of pastel-flannel there depicts graphics for a crib or infant’s pajamas. They were probably the sort with feet & a hood. To snuggle with the bunting the cheek suddenly nuzzles Air Force denim with an insignia of gold wings.   They were worn that summer swallows swarmed over the distant barn, turning silver as harbingers for fog fighter pilots arriving soon after.   Fingers trace the woof & slide onto the cotton of a woman’s favorite housedress & the tenderness it was weary for in the periwinkle print.   Bits of oven mitts, aprons, take the maternal courageous over a crevice of smoking jacket silk, the felt collar’s velvet intimate with civilized cocktail times & brass typewriter keys tapping.   What memoirs are hidden in this - an assortment of letters ...