Poem

Midnight, and I'm Leaving 80 miles per hour and memories fly like bullets. They whiz by an hiss as they pass, lightly graze with a razor's touch. Some sink and burrow into my flesh.

I continue to circle and circle the well-worn grooves of your laughter, I thumb the frayed corners of the pages of your anthology I've memorized. Every little smile and long gaze, every fiber, tendon, and muscle in your hugs. Them, and you, and me in this car tonight.

The vents, with their cool breath, exhale a soft, steady song and the oncoming cars improvise accented jazz rhythms as they pass by and shrink into their own dark horizons.

I could turn and I could follow them, I could barrel through the concrete divider, I could chase them into the mouth of the night and drive until I find that familiar twilight with you, soak my feet in the fresh dewdrops of second chances.

But I stay inside the taunting lines of paint, try to keep my eyes staring straight ahead past the shaky grasp of my headlights, past each and every heavy layer of black that swoops and screams toward me. I cannot turn this car around. There are no exits between dusk and dawn.

And yet, even when I blink, you're on the back of my eyelids, thread-like splices of film, glimmers and glints like microscopic laughter impossible to wipe away.

The past is deaf but still you speak, like echoes or nightmares or records.

Poem

Touching Down in Vietnam Your heavy combat boots dropped down on charred soil, the helicopter dry-heaved your platoon two or three at a time, its blades beat the air, churned your stomach, flashes of light like mosquito bites and black smoke above trembling green fronds, little lead whispers slid past your ears and helmet, some bit into Tom's skull and dissected David's kneecap.

Meanwhile, the church bells of St. John's chimed down the cracked and crumbled concrete of Unity Center Road back home where people waved American flags and burned the brown and gray, draft cards set ablaze in tin coffee cans and duties erased from paper, fathers erased from future family portraits and albums, bills and blame shifted between bent hands of bureaucrats,

blood and dust, stars and stripes, your fear humid and thick like fingers around your neck, the memory of your wife's crystal smile before bed, all mixed in the scarlet trenches,

all before you took that first step to die.