<div class="line">(i)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">I have often told stories about you</div>
<div class="line">as a kid I promised not to forget,</div>
<div class="line">like the photo I kept in my wallet</div>
<div class="line">when you were in boot camp in WWII</div>
<div class="line">posing outside your tent—everyone knew</div>
<div class="line">the future would happen but didn’t let</div>
<div class="line">themselves think too much, only to regret</div>
<div class="line">what was in the past they could not undo.</div>
<div class="line">I’d look at that photo and promise you</div>
<div class="line">thoughts of the Bronx River Housing Project</div>
<div class="line">with you home, like that pic in my wallet,</div>
<div class="line">would remain with me forever. Who knew?</div>
<div class="line">That photo, which had serrated edges,</div>
<div class="line">was lost long ago. So much for pledges.</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">(ii)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Lost long ago, so much for the pledges</div>
<div class="line">to a dead father in a photograph</div>
<div class="line">who stands outside a tent—and almost laughs;</div>
<div class="line">the smile is hard around the edges</div>
<div class="line">and the photo in memory dredges</div>
<div class="line">up memories after the photograph:</div>
<div class="line">an adult, I want to cut time in half</div>
<div class="line">and remember only a boy’s pledges—</div>
<div class="line">but how can you forget what you still know,</div>
<div class="line">cut time in half and remember before</div>
<div class="line">but not ever what will happen later?</div>
<div class="line">It’s not like tearing in half a photo</div>
<div class="line">and pretending you didn’t go to war</div>
<div class="line">or what you did later to my mother.</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">(iii)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">And what you did later to my mother,</div>
<div class="line">a child should never see—court photos</div>
<div class="line">document the violence blow by blow</div>
<div class="line">to justify each restraining order,</div>
<div class="line">which you would comply with, and then ignore.</div>
<div class="line">It must have been I didn’t want to know</div>
<div class="line">and turned my mind off as two shadows</div>
<div class="line">entered the bedroom and closed the door.</div>
<div class="line">The cops would come, as they had come before,</div>
<div class="line">and ask your wife if she wanted to go</div>
<div class="line">with them to the hospital, and she’d say no—</div>
<div class="line">when the door opened, there’d be the neighbors.</div>
<div class="line">This was in the Bronx River Housing Project,</div>
<div class="line">images not in the photo in my wallet.</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">(iv)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Images not in the photo in my wallet—</div>
<div class="line">nor the image of you in your boxer shorts,</div>
<div class="line">cops helping you with your pants. Their reports</div>
<div class="line">included the weapons, German war helmet,</div>
<div class="line">Nazi flag, and the letters you would let</div>
<div class="line">the cops pretend to read, pretend to sort,</div>
<div class="line">then return to the shoe boxes. You were caught</div>
<div class="line">trying to make sense of what you couldn’t forget—</div>
<div class="line">hence, the war trophies on the bed and letters—</div>
<div class="line">and you going over each one again and again,</div>
<div class="line">and never recalling what you’d done to her,</div>
<div class="line">after you promised it would never happen,</div>
<div class="line">after what you had experienced in war.</div>
<div class="line">Your gravestone marker reads “Tank Destroyer.”</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">(v)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Your gravestone marker reads “Tank Destroyer.”</div>
<div class="line">I took my wife and kids there on vacation.</div>
<div class="line">At Bay Pines, they gave me a map of the section</div>
<div class="line">and circled in blue your row with the number.</div>
<div class="line">I went there because I had promised her.</div>
<div class="line">I have a wife, a daughter, and a son.</div>
<div class="line">The visit was a side-trip on the vacation.</div>
<div class="line">By chance, in another section was a bag-piper.</div>
<div class="line">I took a photograph of your grave marker.</div>
<div class="line">It gives your name, rank, and division.</div>
<div class="line">You passed away when you were thirty-seven,</div>
<div class="line">the war over, but a casualty of the war</div>
<div class="line">(and as a casualty, I include my mother),</div>
<div class="line">after convulsive-shock and pneumonia.</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">(vi)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">After convulsive shock and pneumonia</div>
<div class="line">you died—buried in Bay Pines, in Florida.</div>
<div class="line">I went to visit as I’d promised her</div>
<div class="line">before your wife died of liver cancer.</div>
<div class="line">I have the map, with section, row, number,</div>
<div class="line">circled in blue ink I keep in a drawer</div>
<div class="line">with batteries, flashlight, if we lose power</div>
<div class="line">in the next hurricane. I live in Florida.</div>
<div class="line">I’m retired. I was a college professor.</div>
<div class="line">My wife of fifty years (also a teacher,</div>
<div class="line">retired), plans trips to our son and daughter</div>
<div class="line">and daughter’s boyfriend in Seattle each summer.</div>
<div class="line">I don’t live in the Bronx River Housing Project.</div>
<div class="line">I don’t have that photo of you in my wallet.</div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">(vii)</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">I don’t have that photo of you in my wallet</div>
<div class="line">because I lost it a long time ago,</div>
<div class="line">but I do have the cemetery photo—</div>
<div class="line">it’s on my bookcase. I don’t want to forget</div>
<div class="line">that at City College, you wanted to get</div>
<div class="line">your CPA, the war came, you had to go:</div>
<div class="line">That’s you outside that tent in the photo</div>
<div class="line">and the future hasn’t happened, not yet,</div>
<div class="line">and nothing is lost—the photo, the wallet,</div>
<div class="line">the you (almost) smiling because you know</div>
<div class="line">that’s how she needs to see you as you go</div>
<div class="line">off to a future neither of you could expect.</div>
<div class="line">The past is past; what’s done, we can’t undo.</div>
<div class="line">I have often told stories about you.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/GibsonMemorial.mp3"></audio></figure>

Looking In

Poets Respond

Gift Skull

A Crown for My Father on Memorial Day

<p class="epil"><i>for R. G. G., New York PFC 8<br />Tank Destroyer GP, d. January 31, 1959</i></p>
<div class="line">It’s an old, black-and-white serrated-edged photo</div>
<div class="line">taken of my father during his basic training</div>
<div class="line">in World War II—he was drafted: he had to go.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">He looks so young standing outside that tent, akimbo,</div>
<div class="line">in uniform, facing the camera—and sun, squinting—</div>
<div class="line">in that old, black-and-white serrated-edged photo</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">that was tucked in a corner of her mirror—I didn’t know</div>
<div class="line">who it was as a kid, maybe an uncle or something</div>
<div class="line">who was drafted in World War II and had to go.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">When I was eleven, my mother thought I should know:</div>
<div class="line">the man in uniform was my father, who’d gone missing—</div>
<div class="line">all that time, in a black-and-white serrated-edged photo.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">The man who shipped back after Bastogne was a shadow—</div>
<div class="line">but the violence he displayed wasn’t shadow-boxing—</div>
<div class="line">he’d been drafted during World War II and had to go.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Old court records detail everything, blow by blow—</div>
<div class="line">but in this photograph, that man was her everything.</div>
<div class="line">It’s an old black-and-white serrated-edged photo</div>
<div class="line">of my father drafted in World War II. He had to go.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/GibsonThing.mp3"></audio></figure>

December Monologue

By the Numbers

The Real Thing

<p class="epil"><em>Saturday, March 24, 2018</em></p>
<div class="line">After the opera, my two friends start to talk about the war,</div>
<div class="line">drafted, neither back then a dove or hawk about the war.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Our waiter takes drink orders—one wife asks for water;</div>
<div class="line">then another asks that the table talk not be about the war.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">One went on the last troop transport to sail to Vietnam—</div>
<div class="line">flying back, he felt like an outline in chalk because of the war.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">The other, in intelligence, remembers his first time in Saigon—</div>
<div class="line">a half-kid swinging between his own arms on the sidewalk. War.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">The waiter brings the first one’s martini—olives not on the side—</div>
<div class="line">this time the five of us watch him balk—there won’t be war.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Over the bar, it’s the last of tonight’s Elite Eight on the four TVs—</div>
<div class="line">just three of us watch a coach’s widow walk at the end of his war.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Earlier today, March for Our Lives was split-screen everywhere—</div>
<div class="line">Emma Gonzalez’s long silence mocked by a chicken hawk. War.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/GibsonMozart.mp3"></audio></figure>

Girl Like

Love Refrains

After Mozart’s <em>Le Nozze di Figaro</em> at the Kravis in West Palm Beach

<p class="epil"><em>Nuremberg Museum</em></p>
<div class="line">Göring leaned over to Hess to crack a joke—</div>
<div class="line">they’re with those other killers who meant no harm:</div>
<div class="line">everything Nazis did, they did for blood and volk.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">I grew up in the Bronx. Jews went up in smoke.</div>
<div class="line">My neighbors had numbers tattooed on forearms.</div>
<div class="line">Göring leaned over to Hess to crack a joke.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">The woman giving testimony hardly spoke</div>
<div class="line">when Göring moved to grab Hess by the arm—</div>
<div class="line">everything Nazis did, they did for blood and volk.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">Hess didn’t move—he looked comatose—</div>
<div class="line">Göring elbowed: the third time was the charm.</div>
<div class="line">Göring leaned over to Hess to crack a joke.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">My father was at Bastogne—something broke</div>
<div class="line">(after the war, electroshock intended to calm).</div>
<div class="line">Everything Nazis did, they did for blood and volk.</div>
<div> </div>
<div class="line">America’s Neo-Nazi White Supremacists stoke</div>
<div class="line">fear: they bear torches to bring on the storm.</div>
<div class="line">Göring leaned over to Hess to crack a joke.</div>
<div class="line">Everything Nazis did, they did for blood and volk.</div><figure class="wp-block-audio"><audio controls src="https://admin.rattle.com/audio/GibsonKillers.mp3"></audio></figure>

Long Car Line Prayer

Tattered and Broken

Killers

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August 20, 2017KillersStephen Gibson

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