DMZ


Coming home, Paul went home
after three years working
construction to finance
a pit of a flat, unarmed
and uncongenial drinking
within stumbling distance of it,
then some tenuous counseling,
avoiding jail and the VA.

I envy him - not the war,
but action.
I could equally envy construction.
Postmodernist interruption
is a tool of writers
who doubt (or are all too sure of)
the self, and therefore
attack/cozy up to their characters.

He may have imagined
twenty years of caring for his father
(who never picked or ended
fights, required or praised
his son's new yessirs, nosirs
and finicky neatness,
or willingly talked),
then another ten for his mother,

but smoking killed the old man
under Ford, and freedom the mother
under Carter.
So he came down from his attic
in darkness, touching throws,
chintzes, dryrot, tools,
rifles (which he sold),
and drank again, then got a job with the city.

Where am I going with this.
They had absolutely no books.
Do I believe my own hint that his guarded
diffidence suggests depth?
He smiled blankly, seldom …
There is also the question,
unattributed, faint,
whether he only killed soldiers.

He found himself in mud again
repairing cables,
and in the company of men.
(Some talked with him privately,
briefly, about units,
wounds, places, the dead.)
One introduced a cousin, one
a club.  Women

liked the old house, his new bed.
They left traces: suggestions
about furniture, lights,
color.
Some of them spoke
a rapidly dying discourse
of blame, and worlds in struggle,
and then they saw hatred

and fled -
confusing him less
than their nebulous praise
(at the end of a joint, and before
silences gathered) of
feeling.
"I have feelings," he said.
He had enough trouble

at night, in school.  (Can I empathize
with that courseload?
One fact per dollar.
One skill per semester.
He wanted a white collar.
Yet is it false to imagine
that even those words
entailed brooding, ambivalence, visions?

No … )  He quit
drugs, then drinking.
At an AA meeting,
he met a typist fighting
the arrival of screens.
(A would-be artist?
Rather, a diarist.
I omit her viewpoint.)

She had kept a journal
since childhood (about which
don't ask - Paul
didn't; it was
there during bad nights,
when they clung to each other),
and now, when he dug
in the yard, he saw her writing

at a sunlit table
in his old room.
It felt weird that, upstairs,
words existed about him,
who was never easy with words.
Sometimes he clowned, orated
for the secret record.
For two years her son watched

him work.  Neither rage,
threats,
appeals to everyone
doing their part, nor Joanne
could make him help
(they would save on veggies!),
study, neaten his room
or help

with housework.
(At ten, the kid was articulate
but only yelled
variations of the statement
that Paul wasn't his father.)
The pretense of ignoring him became
habit, and Paul
enjoyed housework,

hours studying
(he earned a desk
in Power and Roads),
Joanne's grateful silence
and occasional, circular, nightlong, muttered
workings-out of
his or her fears; he
felt, obscurely

(I must be cautious
here), that things were
as they should be, bad
or good.  He considered, not
in words, the concept of penance,
understood that it must be unfair
if the crime is unclear.  His worry now
was the bad crowd,

drugs, jail he foresaw
for the boy.  But before they happened,
the kid joined him
one day after morning cartoons.  "You know,
when I didn't help you that time, I
thought you would kill me."
"I wanted to," said Paul.
- "But you didn't.

You get angry, but - "
"I was in
a war," said Paul, "and ever since … "
The kid waited; then,
"Do you think my Mom will start drinking again?"
"I don't know," Paul said.  "We try not to."
And the boy started
to weed.

I'm not happy with this one.
Perhaps, not being meant
allegorically, it becomes
too thin an allegory?
Am I going the way of Hamsun or Benn
who, tired of their own
necessary terror, sought positive values?
I like to think Paul "lives,"

yet it's entertainment, not art,
that justifies itself
by saying, "It's about this guy … "  So,
flash forward
over the Prozac part, the bills,
the economy.
In the spring of the boy's senior year,
touring Ivy League schools, they stopped

in Washington.
Leaving wife and son to stare at suspended
missiles and planes, Paul walked
to the Wall.
It was new, still, and among
other crying, thickened,
variously ragged men,
and women and children

laying notes, mementos and
flowers, he stood a long time.
He found without trouble
the nine or ten names
he knew, and thought
with utter clarity
that names too
are words.

And other names he didn't know,
torturers, tortured, and wholly
innocent, were inscribed on the day,
unforgiving but very still.
The monument of the dead is a wall,
he thought.  That of the living
is a pyramid,
absurdly balanced on its point.