Two poems from 2011

I wrote the following two poems in 2011 during a brief "fling" with a Mennonite girl who couldn't bring herself to meet my fawning adoration with like affection. She was a poet and she inspired me to write a number of poems, but only these two stand out to me as being any good. After the Mennonite girl severed ties with me she moved back to rural Pennsylvania to be with her family. Good for her.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011- Officer's hands

On a family trip to Plymouth,
we visited the Mayflower,
or a replica of the Mayflower.

I was eight years old and liked
to read books about seafaring,
books about cabin boys.

After the tour of the ship,
my dad and I were sitting
under a tree near Plymouth Rock,

looking at the vessel from a distance,
when one of the actors
dressed as a sailor walked over.

These actors wandered around town,
playing people from another time,
never breaking their characters.

“Do you like boats?” he asked me
in his gruffest sailor voice,
but I was shy and didn’t respond,

so my dad informed the “sailor”
of information recently confided,
“He’d like to climb the rigging,”

which is something I read about
not too long previous
in a book about a cabin boy.

The “sailor” glared at me sidelong
as if speculating before bellowing,
“Let me see yer hands!!!!!!!”

I held out one hand to him.
He grasped my wrist, turning
the appendage different angles,

scrutinizing the boyish skin
for several silent moments,
before releasing it dramatically.

“These are an officer’s hands!”
he said, almost in disgust,
“You have to have hands like this,”

holding out his own calloused palms
“if you want to climb the rigging
or you’d never make it to the top!”

In my subsequent childhood years,
I would re-imagine the encounter,
and what might have happened

if I had been really tough.
In this version my response would
have been to take out a knife!

and slice open the palm of my hand,
hold out the bloody gash to the “sailor”
and cry, “You call these an officer’s hands!”

This fantasy replayed in my thoughts
for far too long, until I grew out of it
by realizing the “sailor” was correct.

I have an officer’s hands and always have.
I work in an office, where my hands
are never soiled for very long

before I wash them in the restroom
before going back to type letters.
I’ve never been much of a manual laborer,

thinking it didn’t matter, because
that was the point of my going to college,
the upward mobility my parents sought for me,

to work in an office and keep my hands clean,
but now that I’m here it doesn’t feel right.
I don’t belong in either place it seems,

laboring in sweat covered days
or wearing a collared shirt and tie,
getting places by sending out résumés.

It seems that I have been deceived,
something that became apparent
not too long ago in a conversation

with two female friends as we walked
to a breakfast and they talked
about men they were dating lately.

The first one said she liked this new guy
who is a plumber and a carpenter
and the second made a noise of approval.

Not a word, just a noise, almost instinctual,
a soft moan from deep inside of her,
harkening and calling forth usefulness.

This was only two weeks ago,
yet that noise brought back to me
the fantasy of my bloody palm,

held out in defiance to the “sailor”
who said I would never make it
to the top of the rigging,

a prophecy that my upward mobility
would take place in an elevator
after pressing my spotless finger

against a button reading “4”
every morning, five days a week
without an end in sight.

These officer’s hands will never illicit
a soft noise of approval
from my kind of people,

the people I left behind
chasing a promise we were told
was certain to deliver us.

Deliver us where? I now ask
each night alone in bed
after setting my alarm

for another day at the office.
And now I sit at my desk
thinking about that day in Plymouth

when I was eight years old.
After we left the Mayflower,
we walked through a small park

and came upon a natural spring
right in the middle of town,
cold water bubbling from the ground.

I put my hand into the water
but no blood was washed away
because it is an officer’s hand.

Friday, November 4, 2011- Running Away

1.

Morning light would
always wake me early
when I was four years old.

In my footie pajamas
I sat in the front room
of our trailer in the country,

looking at the lawn grow bright
as the sun passed above the treetops.

Soon my mother would rise,
prepare for work and leave
after the arrival of Mrs. Harding
who watched my baby sister,
my brother and me.

My morning vigil
was a quiet time,
a secret time for me,
before the day began
with its activities,

mostly playing in the woods
with my little brother.

My father would leave
for work much earlier,
usually before dawn,
to drive the school bus.

Time on a clock ruled
the comings and goings
of my parents,

when they awoke and
when they left the house
and when they returned,

but my schedule was
determined by morning light.

Late in October the time changed,
the sun came up an hour earlier,

I woke up an hour earlier, unaware,

I went and sat in the chair
by the window, my usual place.

I saw a thing I had
never seen so early in the morning,
a car leaving the driveway.

My young mind
had never comprehended
this part of the day
when my father
left for work
long before my vigil.

Due to some confusion,
my dreamlike child’s perception,
I saw two heads in the front seats
of the departing vehicle,

both of my parents running away.

I went outside
waving my arms and yelling,
but the car turned onto the road.

I ran to the end of the driveway,
into the middle of the road,
saw red taillights disappearing
beyond the horizon of a distant hill.

Still I chased it, running in that direction
down the road, tears now streaming
from my eyes, as cold asphalt chilled
the soles of my pajama feet.

Soon I realized it was hopeless,
they were gone, but I kept running,

the cornfield stretching out to my left,
a patch of forest to my right and then
old Mrs. Bailey’s house which I passed,

continuing on past more trees to
the house of my parents’ friends,
the Wickstrom’s,
nestled back in the wood.

I pounded on the door
until Deena Wickstrom
opened it to see me
standing there in pajamas.

“My parents drove away,”
I told her,
“They’ve left me all alone.”
She looked confused.

We got in her car
and drove back.

Deena knocked on our trailer door,
there was no answer,
so she tried the knob.

We went inside and down the hall,
to my parents’ bedroom door
on which she softly knocked again.

Moments later my disheveled mother
fresh from sleep emerged
and Deena explained her presence.

My parents had not run away,
I wanted to be happy,
but I was still afraid.

2.

My favorite childhood movie
was about a girl named Natty
whose father crosses the country
for a job cutting trees
leaving her in the city.

She doesn’t stay there long,
catching a train west,
setting out on a journey,
perilous in nature,
she takes up with a wolf
who seems sworn
to protect her,
until she reaches her father.

This movie affected me.
I watched it repeatedly.

3.

At the age of five
I went to school,

no more mornings
playing pet dog
with my brother,

now it was letters and numbers
and standing in line,

it was waking up on time,
ruled by the clock.

I learned to read and write
and with my brother
a plan did I concoct.

The first letter I ever wrote
to my mother said:
“I’m sorry mommy,
we are running away
from home.”

I made two copies,
one to go under each of our pillows.

The plan was this: in the middle of night
I would rise before the dawn
and take my brother away,

I did not know where,
not to a father that had abandoned us,
but into the woods,
on a journey of adventure,

my brother running beside me,
he had played pet dog,
now he would play pet wolf.

The plan was perfect,
the notes were under our pillows
but in the morning I slept too late.

The sun was up
when I crumpled up my note,
put it in the trash,
and went to get my brother’s,

where I found my mother
making his bed,
no note in sight.

She must have found it,
but she never mentioned it,
and I never tried to run away again.

4.

My sister did,
maybe five years later.

She was another convert
to the gospel of Natty Gann,

the good news of the woods,
of escape and of freedom.

I don’t remember the circumstance,
only her deciding to pack her
small child-sized suitcase
and walk into the woods
behind our house.

Of course she left a note.

After a few hours of her gone,
or maybe only twenty minutes,
my brother and I went looking.

We found her
sitting on the ground
pretending the branches
of a fallen tree
were a shelter.

She looked bored.

My brother and I decided
to make her a better shelter
by dragging large branches,
arranging them together,
lined up and leaning against
the fallen tree,
making a space that
could be crawled into.

We left my sister there,
and a few hours later,
or maybe twenty minutes,
she came home
and unpacked her suitcase.

The structure we had built
remained for years to come.

5.

Our practice pets were bunnies,
really we wanted a dog,
but really we wanted a wolf!

But we got bunnies.

The first one, Wiggles,
lived in a pen outside
in the summertime.

We came home
from church one day
to find the pen
ravaged by a dog.

Wiggles was nowhere in sight.

Then we had Brownie,
who lived longer
but died prematurely
due to a giant tumor
on his chest.

Finally it was time to get a dog!

In the classifieds we found
a “pure-bred” Siberian Husky
(papers were not included)
for a hundred dollars,
paid for by my father.

We named him Rocky.

Rocky never lived to be fully grown,
the wolf in him made him
prone to wander,
and though we lived in the woods,
it wasn’t too far from a busy road.

We buried him in the yard
next to Brownie.

At last there was Heidi
the yellow lab with blonde hair
like everyone else in the family,
who lived until us kids moved out

and a few years after that too.

Rocky was the closest we came
to running with wolves
but he couldn’t guide us
through the wilderness
because it was gone.

6.

My sister ran away with a man
when she was eighteen.

Not really a wolf in sheep’s clothing
but maybe just a wolf
the way he robbed the lamb
from my parents’ flock.

They got married.
They bought a house.
They had a baby.

Then he felt the call of the wild and left.
Now she’s coming home.

7.

My brother ran away to Alaska,
the nearest to the dream.

He always was more serious
about life as an adventure,
the one who likes hunting,
extreme sports, the outdoors,

and flying helicopters,
which took years of training.

He pursued danger as a lifestyle,
soon he will go to war.

8.

I ran away to Philadelphia,
not exactly “the journey
that realized the impossible”
or however the trailer for
Natty Gann’s movie says it.

I had to get away after
crashing my car into a ditch
while drunk,

and spending the next six months
in programs designed
to make me a better person.

When the programs were over
I left home, sometimes I go back.

A few nights ago I watched
The Journey of Natty Gann
for the first time in years
and found myself asking,

“Could Natty exist today?”

A child driven into the wild
for the sake of love,
protected by a savage
and majestic creature
against what humans
she encounters.

Out of reach of the so-called
“civilized world”
she finds her father in the woods.

Sometimes my heart still seeks this,
to run away with wolves.

Notes from a family trip to the beach

Arrival


I arrived at Myrtle Beach airport on Sunday morning. My parents picked me up. They had talked of going to a local evangelical church directly from the airport, but thank the LORD this did not happen. I had woken at 4am that morning, showered, shaved, packed, and walked through the ghetto to Temple train station to catch the 5:19am to the airport. I was somewhat tired and didn't feel like singing praise choruses.

We went straight to the condo my parents had rented. We took a walk on the beach and at some point waded out into the water. I body surfed and my knees scraped against the pebbles near the shoreline. We went back to the condo and my parents went back to the airport to pick up my sister and nephew.

Erika

The hurricane, or tropical storm, or whatever it was, called Erika descended on Monday. It was not terribly powerful. The rain was soft. The wind was steady but not strong. It lasted all day. Still,  it was our second day at the beach so we went for a walk in the morning. We walked along as the waves rolled in, my 4 year old nephew stopping to dig into the sand every so often. Making sandcakes in his hand he would dip them into the water and the waves would dissolve them. My father (Pop Pop) said that the ocean was eating the sandcakes. I imagined our ancestors along the shores of Europe telling similar stories to their young ones twenty thousand years ago.

I was seduced by the ruckus of the waves in the storm. I couldn't hold back. I entered on my hands and knees, crawling backwards letting each wave crash upon me and push me forward and then the next one drawing up the receding tide would pull me back deeper. Deeper and deeper I went, basically operating to the bare minimum, letting myself be tossed and turned by the glorious power of nature, waves, fractal chaos, perfect order, all in one. From time to time I would exercise my leg muscles, pushing off forward to the shore and being completely taken, still not in control despite my thrashing limbs. Salty water entered my nose and mouth and eyes. I rose to my feet looking up at the rain falling, allowing it to clean the stinging liquid from my face.

In the afternoon the storm faded, the sun seemed to come out, but every time we went back outside it started to rain again. At some point I stepped out onto the balcony and yelled, "Hey everybody! There's a rainbow out here!" They all came out and marveled. "Where do rainbows come from, Wesley?" my mother asked my nephew. "From the rain!" he said, but she chided him: "Noooo! Rainbows come from God! It's his promise that he will never destroy the world with a flood again." Wesley seemed confused. I said nothing. The ocean eating the sand makes more sense.

The Nice Young Lady

On Tuesday the weather was sunny. The ocean was calm. My parents went out the earliest it was legally allowed to set up umbrellas on the beach. An hour later, I went out there with my mother and my nephew. My mother was watching Wesley dig in the sand so I said I wanted to go out into the waves. It was nothing like the storm. There was no passion. No power. No being drawn into a trance. This is how it would be for the rest of the week whenever I went into the water.

A minute or so after I was chest deep I saw a woman wading out toward me. With my glasses off, I couldn't tell what she looked like. I thought she was older than me by a decade or more. She came close, about 20 feet away. I still couldn't see her face. I said nothing to her. What was I supposed to say? She floated away, northward about 50 feet and then came back. Then she floated away again.

I went back to shore. My mother asked, "Did you talk to that nice young lady who waded out after you?" I said no. I couldn't even tell that it was a young lady without my glasses. "Oh," said my mother, "It looked like she wanted you to talk to her." I was somewhat taken aback. I guess being a 30-something bachelor, people just expect me to talk to strange ladies in the ocean, even my own very religious mother. I had no idea. My general self diagnosis of being a failure in all social situations descended heavy upon me. And as I sat on the beach with my glasses on and watched the nice young lady come ashore and saw what I had not seen before, well...it didn't help much.

I would continue to see the nice young lady throughout the rest of the week. I even passed her on the street while wandering the near dead town of North Myrtle Beach by myself. But we never spoke. Perhaps we could have spoken but I suppose that it was up to me and I supposed that I had already blown it. Later that day, I was drifting in the ocean with my mother and she informed me that down in the South was the place where I would meet a nice conservative Christian girl. I agreed. Down in the South. In the ocean.

Pizza Shop Location Screw Up

Wednesday was pretty much the same as Tuesday. The ocean was calm. We went down to the beach twice; once in the morning and once in the afternoon. In the evening my parents and I went into Myrtle Beach proper, to check out the board walk. This board walk was only a few blocks long, the section with actual boardwalk-type attractions was only two blocks long. We had been told that the boardwalk in Mytle Beach can be very seedy, but as we walked down the two block stretch with the stores, all we saw was families and thought it wasn't so bad.

After the boardwalk ended the walkway continued as a cement promenade. We continued on it, but there were no more stores, just hotels about a hundred feet off of the promenade. Things were very dark and quiet. We encountered a beggar, begging for money. We saw small groups of shady looking people drinking from bottles in paper bags. My father asked if I thought we were safe. I said I thought we were but I could now understand the "seedy" description. We walked to the end of the promenade where there was a pier with restrooms. Then we walked back.

At the section of boardwalk with attractions we went into an arcade looking for pinball, but there weren't any pinball machines. We all got ice cream cones at a concession stand. My parents both got black raspberry and I got peanut butter fudge. Things had changed in the last hour. I have to admit that it felt pretty seedy. We went back to the car and drove home.

Up until now, my mom had made dinner every night. But now my parents were talking about ordering pizza for dinner on Thursday night. That would be my last night in Myrtle beach, as I flew back to Philly on Friday morning. Various options were discussed. On the ride back from the boardwalk to the condo I made sure to point out pizza shops as we neared our destination. But my father had thought it best to order from Papa John's.

When we got back to the condo I used my phone to look up reviews of the different pizza shops I had seen on the way home, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was impossible to tell whether or not they would be better or worse than Papa John's. When my father looked up Papa John's online he found it strange that he was being told there was a location at the exact address of our condo. This was obviously wrong. There was no Papa John's so close by. But when I looked at the results he was getting on his laptop it clearly showed that there was.

I decided to go to the Papa John's web site and do a location search by entering the zip code of the condo. The results showed that the nearest Papa John's was about a mile away on highway 17. For some reason, when I showed this to my dad, he become enraged, thinking that I was somehow claiming that he did the search wrong. I explained that I wasn't disagreeing with him, but that I just thought there was a mistake on Google Maps. But he insisted that he had also searched the Papa John's web site and that's where he had seen the incorrect location. I didn't know what to make of this. My father said "You're really pissing me off!" and stormed out of the room with his laptop slamming his bedroom room.

Later, laying in my own bed, sleepless, I took my phone and looked up the Google Maps erroneous location of the Papa John's and submitted a report to Google saying that the location was incorrect.

Turtle Feed

Thursday was yet another calm day on the beach, for the most part. My father drove me to Kinko's to print my boarding pass for my flight back to Philly. Then we went out onto the beach. Then we came inside and had ham buns like every other day that week. Then we went outside to the beach again. But it started raining. And soon it started raining very hard. We packed up all the umbrellas and beach toys and went inside. The storm got worse and worse.

My parents had decided that they no longer wanted to order pizza for dinner. Instead we were going to Ryan's Buffet, a franchise owned by the same corporation that owns Old Country Buffet. When we thought the storm was subsiding we all got into the minivan and headed toward Ryan's out on highway 17. But the storm was not nearly over. It was like we were driving in a river. All of the roads had at least six inches of water flowing over them and sometimes over a foot. We overshot Ryan's missing the driveway and had to turn around and come back. A huge hassle in the storm.

Inside the food was both delicious and horrible. I think I gained 15 pounds from that one meal. There was four kinds of fried fish, two kinds of fried shrimp, a salad bar with four kinds of lettuce and every kind of salad ingredient. There was meat loaf, tacos, chicken teriyaki, pizza, black eyed peas, collard greens, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, tater tots, buttery "Texas" buns, three kinds of soup, and about forty other options, not counting dessert. It was Kids Night and my nephew got two helpings of cotton candy from a middle aged lady dressed in a mediocre clown costume.

After leaving the buffet, we went to an outdoor shopping center situated on a lake with floating wooden bridges. We walked around looking at the different shops and discovered a small pond filled with carp and turtles. For a quarter you could purchase some kind of food to throw in the water. My father and my sister each bought handfuls of the food and doled it out to my nephew. We knelt on the the artificial stony shore of the pond and dropped brown nuggets in the water in front of turtle faces. They were so eager for more they climbed out of the water but then became afraid and immediately dove back in. After four handfuls of food, my nephew was bored, but I was still picking up scraps that had fallen on the edge of the pond and tossing them to the turtles.

We looked at a few more shops. Wesley threw a temper tantrum because my sister wouldn't buy him a camouflage colored snake plush toy for $16. I was the one who had to grab it away from him and place it on a shelf above his reach. We walked back to the car parked near a pizza shop called Ultimate California Pizzeria, and drove back to the condo and went to sleep.

Something Is Coming

I awoke at 7am. My flight was at 10am but we were leaving at 8am. I took the last of many showers in the condo that week. I sat with my mother eating cornflakes. "Make sure, when you get back," my mother said, "that you read your Bible every day and get ready, because something is coming. Change is in the air. We know not the time, but it is coming." I assume she was talking about the rapture, but I said nothing. I just ate my cornflakes.

My parents dropped me off in the airport. I had two beers in the bar before the flight, even though it was only 9am. In a few hours I would be back in Philly.