Güd wrtr

(Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023, Veterans’ Day)

You said it never left you:

5 things you could see—
• The letter summoning you
• The doctor’s large finger in the cold exam room
• The big yellow bus that was not taking you to school
• Your first barracks
• The freshly shaved heads of your fellow soldiers

4 things you could hear—
• Ten-hut!
• All right, maggots—drop and give me 20.
• the rat-a-tat of assault rifles
• the chatter of your heart

3 things you could feel—
• The cold submachine gun in your sweaty hands
• The clammy neck of a downed soldier; praying for a pulse
• Your aching, blistered, rotting feet

2 things you could smell—
• Blood, sometimes your own
• Death, not your own—yet

1 thing you could taste—
• Coming home, never the same, but home,
Hallelujah. You lucky bastard.

•••

In memory of my father, Roger E. Haag, infantryman in the Korean War, with gratitude.

That if no one comes to write,
I’ve opened the dance floor,
and I can dance just fine by myself.

I will sit in the loft, put on
the kettle for tea and see
what shows up, word-wise.

The point is to lace up
the tap shoes (or ballet slippers
or favorite footwear of the moment),

join the words tripping the light
fantastic, and follow their lead
as they pick up their syllabic

feet and start to boogie.
There is no incorrect set of steps,
no funky rhythm that someone

will critique. The tea will steep,
and the clock will tick, and
the words and I shall foxtrot,

twist, watusi and samba
until there is no time,
no one but us floating

through a dreamy ballroom
of imagination, dancing
cheek to cheek

in heaven, we’re in heaven,
phrase after phrase,
sentence after glorious

waltzing sentence.

•••

You can watch Fred Astaire sing to Ginger Rogers as they dance to Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” in this clip from the 1935 movie “Top Hat.”

(for Deborah Meltvedt)

On our morning walk along the river
path, Deb and I stop several times
to watch the progress of a…

Is that a sea lion? In the American River?!

…flopping acrobatically, swimming
fast, popping up, then diving into
concentric circles of expanding
water, a long way from home.

Some of us are like that—
natural explorers setting out
into uncharted waters, eager to
see what can be seen, and when
we spot this adventurer’s
dog-like head zigging and zagging
downstream, we landlubbers
cheer.

“They follow the fish,” Deb says,
of the lithe, ear-flapped pinniped
likely hot on the trail of salmon
making their way back upstream
after their long journey to the sea.

This splashing gymnast is not
the only one of his kind, adds Deb,
who knows this path well.
“Sometimes we see two of them.”
The big guy and his mate are
no strangers to fresh water,
have likely flippered their way
up a river or two before.

But to us, it’s like watching a
visitor explore new territory:
We wonder what he sees under
the surface, imagine a murky
underwater world with waving
grasses and swimming critters.

We stand and look and watch
for him until his slick head
disappears, silently wish him
safe passage, happy hunting,
bon voyage.

In the opposite season I make my way up the hill
that careens down to the lake, lessened by summer,
that body that sends water down long river arms
to my city, many miles away.

Months ago I sat here when grass flourished freshly green,
when oaks budded with new leaves, and the world
felt clean and bright. In the opposite season
the world has darkened again, and pain knowingly
inflicted rises like dust from rubble.

In the opposite season, I stand amid crackling grasses
that winter rains will, we hope, soften to allow them
to rise next year, remade. I carry despair in my pocket,
wanting the forever spring, the fullness of lake,
the abundance of what we believe was promised:

safety, white healing light, peace.

Trees in the fall remind me: It’s OK to lose things. It’s OK.
—Steve Garnaas-Holmes

•••
(for Catherine O’Brien)
•••

Because there’s a difference between losing
something & shedding—one more intentional

than the other—I trust Elizabeth Bishop:
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”

But neither does losing always spell disaster,
though it can feel that way, in watching a beloved

lose robust good health, in a fall that is
not the season, not about leaves, but the kind

that results in injury, that makes us wonder
if this loss scatters more of our marbles,

our independence, how we make our way
in the world. Look at the trees, which, like us,

are slowly working their way to an end,
& take a leaf from their branches, perhaps

not as sturdy as they once were, but neither do
they mourn the departure of their summer green

skirts—shedding is what we do in small &
large ways. We lose things. Sometimes big things.

It’s OK. We go on—losing, yes,
& trusting that, somehow, we are held,

that we will be found.

(for Dickie)

Every time I do this in
the backyard, when I get
to the back of your head,

the strands gleaming like crystal
filaments in afternoon light
leaking through browning

sycamore leaves, I admire
the circumference of your
scalp—a perfect half circle,

actually—as if someone drew
a smile in the center where
so many follicles attach.

You often say you don’t
have many hairs left, but
you do back here—I run

the comb through them,
snip the ends to tidy them
up, love watching the silvery

scissors wink in the sunlight,
doing their magic of turning
back time, shaving years

off your countenance,
remaking you, as a haircut
should every time,

fresh and bright.

(for Lisa)

The Sunday we fall back,
after lunch and a play,
Lisa and I walk my

neighborhood with an eye
to the cloudy sky seeming
to darken faster than usual.

Time shifts always feel
jarring for the first few
bars—as we old band

people know well—going
from a predictable 4/4
(stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive)

to a waltzy 3/4 mixed
with a circular 6/8 time
(I like to be in A-mer-i-ca).

And our feet step in
rhythm as the afternoon
winds faster into evening,

not marching in time as
we once did across a
football field in fall,

but scuffing over leaves
suddenly painted scarlet
or brittled brown, not to

mention the ombres of
the Chinese pistache trees
reddening from the top down.

We walk and talk, pick up
the pace on the final block
home, darkness falling along

with the leaves waltzing
(1-2-3, 1-2-3) downward,
surprised, like us, to see

dark so early, as if we’ve
not experienced a time
change every autumn

of our blessedly long lives,
as if we don’t know
what’s coming.

Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.

—William Stafford, from “Being a Person”

•••

(for Deborah)

I, who have so many words,
as you do, too, when we arrive
at spots on the still-damp path
where the trees unfold their
arms in a ta-da! reveal,

we go silent, breathing in
the reflection of morning
on water, absorbing the stillness
of refracted light and mirrored
color. And we find ourselves
rooted, too,

awestruck by the tableau
across the river of blue heron
standing tall on a rocky sandbar
with an egret and five mallards
nearby—

until you pop up with a new take
on an old joke:
A heron, an egret and five
ducks walk onto a sandbar….

Then our laughter floats into this
inconstant season, changing by
the minute, as the birds well know,
undisturbed by human visitors
who have stopped, who listen,

all of us, before moving into
what comes next.

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

—Stanley Kunitz, from “The Round”

•••

I’m with you, Stanley,
eager for the next day to unfold

like one of those cootie-catchers,
as kids in my day called them—
a nifty bit of origami folded
from a single sheet of paper
into four pyramid-shaped parts
upheld by a child’s fingers.

A friend would come to you
with one and invite you to pick
a color on an outside flap, then
open and close it (usually to
a catchy rhyme), then peel open
a flap it to reveal an answer to
your question.

It resembled a do-it-yourself
Magic 8 Ball, with answers like:

• Yes
• Mostly likely
• Without a doubt
• Signs point to yes
• Ask again later
• Don’t count on it
• My sources say no

But Stanley, what if the little paper
fortune tellers offered sweeter
predictions? Like:

• You will find coins under
the couch cushions.
Or
• You have a secret admirer.
Or
• Ignore previous fortunes.

Let’s head into each tomorrow
wide-eyed and smiling.
Every day’s a new day, my late
best friend used to say,
her pep talks still ping-ponging
through me:

• Life is a balance of holding on
and letting go.
• You’re off to great places.
• Now it’s time to try something new.

And oh, yes, yes, yes:

• Even when life throws you a detour,
behold the scenery. Shift your outlook.
Enjoy the ride.

•••

“It’s the aluminum rule: Thou shalt enjoy the ride.” Thanks, Antsy McClain and the Trailer Park Troubadours!

The country has just begun to put on her robe of tints. The earliest trees are decked in palest orange, working gradually into scarlet & crimson. It is like a sunset to see the earth & sky putting on the manners of the evening.

—Letter from Emily Dickinson to her friend Abiah Root, 1851

•••

Forgive the impolite use of your first name
when we have not been properly introduced,

though I feel that we have, thanks to another
belle of Amherst, a poet I knew who, some

120 years after your death, sent me walking
on my first visit to the town she shared with you,

pointed me to the cemetery where I could find
you, then to your house to stand in your bedroom

and look out the window into venerable trees
robing themselves in autumn tints,

shimmering in late afternoon light.
Later I gathered acorns from your lawn

to bring home, not to plant in the earth,
but cradle in a palm or pocket on a walk—

you two poets tucked into my heart—
poeting as we go,

always as we go.

•••

(for Pat Schneider, one of the belles of Amherst, and, of course, for Emily Dickinson)