**Poem: "Your Service"

Your Service

Tatters of dinette chairs flap in the Gulf breeze.

Like an island’s backside,

suburban bungalow, pink with sun,

private side of conches and radishes.

Owner and occupant, survivor,

outlives wife, sister, lives

to tell the story again and again

of barbaric Japs on a Pacific

island, two week mission

drawn out over months,

long beyond strategy,

mired in rote maneuver, headless

torsos, rotting wounded,

military brass losing interest.

The old man, then nineteen,

lost there whatever youth he had

coming to him.

He borrowed a watch from

one of the corpses

as a souvenir, inherits it back

when his mother dies, naturally,

of Camels and a broken heart.

Almost too late, an interviewer

asks all about it. The old man,

fingers on the kitchen faucet,

tells about the battle, details

he laughed around for decades.

At work, he managed a theater,

another water spectacular

where the stage revolved,

spun on the ocean like a

top of dreams.

Guy Lombardo, loyal Canadian,

led the band afterwards

under the tent, under the stars,

and the Schaefer flowed.

The old man writes a book

about going back to Brooklyn,

visiting his dead buddy’s family,

describing to them the quiet death

he didn’t have,

sparing them details

no civilian could bear.

The book stirs a little interest,

Hollywood consults, documentary

cameos, but it doesn’t last.

There are too many stories in this world

for our innocent audience to

linger long over one. The old man

sinks into the archives, where his war

is one of thousands.

He still keeps a neat house,

pool cemented over, dolphins

parading the canal two shows a day.

The sun pounds the sofa.

Pink carpet fades where

windows have their way.

We watch a DVD where he

and others tell their stories,

for once backed up by

newly found footage,

military cameras sent to

record victory, instead see

butchered bodies, men dancing

hysterics, lost in deranged performance.

The old man remarks,

“What do the kids say now?

‘Thanks for your service’?”

I nod, no better response

than that well-meaning,

knee jerk platitude suggested

by a lollipop media that still can’t

grasp the depth of the experience.

If service is productive, meaningful,

something built where there was less,

then his time in Pacific was a service.

Did he intend to serve his country?

Only propaganda films,

patriotic melodramas aim that high.

Leaving the stickball, the pretty girls

behind in the wild youth of Brooklyn,

he enlisted, hoping for a better time

than those that waited to be drafted.

What he got was gore no film could capture.

What he got was a watch whose time

had stopped in Peleliu,

gears ground to a solid halt

decades before.

CAR 3/7/16