Poetry
Body Work*
Your body doesn’t know,
my therapist tells me,
that the baby is long gone, years ago.
She says my body has harbored and nurtured
this baby for seventeen years
wondering when the hell
it would drop between my legs
and be gone.
I look inside, I visualize, and
by God, she’s right!
But not a baby,
an enormous fetus
with a gigantic head too large
for any but a caesarean birth.
I can see that huge fetus
as though its image was projected
onto a large, color TV screen.
I see the veins on its head,
the tiny fingers and toes,
the hand raised toward its mouth
and the eyes that don’t yet see.
And I wonder why this extended metaphor
pops up so palpably now as my daughter,
not yet an adult,
and with so much yet to learn,
whose separation from me is
like a growing dot on a rapidly approaching horizon,
is sending out her college applications
with such unbridled glee.
And I think this
is a separation
my body will remember.
Up To Our Necks*
After a Life Magazine photo of
U.S. soldiers in Vietnam
Late afternoon.
The shadows are long.
If I were home, and had a job,
I’d be looking at the clock,
waiting for 5 o’clock or 6 to hit
and I’d be outta there.
I’d have a car, a Chevy,
to cruise home and I’d have a girl,
maybe Marian Brown
or her sister. I’d have dry smokes
and seat covers. I wouldn’t be up
to my neck in water and fear.
Nothing would have brushed
past my leg
and there wouldn’t be water buffalo
on the far bank.
I wouldn’t be wondering what human
was watching over them
and if I’m about to shoot someone
the age of my brother Ricky.
I’d be in the kitchen, hugging my mother
until she told me enough already,
I got things to do
without you hanging on me all day.
* “Body Work” originally appeared in The Dos Passos Review and “Up to Our Necks” appeared first in AIM, America’s Intercultural Magazine.