At Fort Benning GA
where father trained for eventual D Day
invasion of Normany, WW II 1944
^,^
Ritual Waters
The mighty Fox River now sees the young Burmese father
At its banks
communing with the moving water
Which flows like the
Ihrewhaddy in his homeland
Slowly but surely,
and it has fish
Hla rides my bicycle
– now his - in spare moments and
continues
His pursuit of a
livelihood at the Fox River
The other day he told
me he caught eight big fish
“How big?” - and he held his thumbs and middle fingers
together
to represent girth
instead of hands far apart to represent length
the way we do around
here
which said he is
thinking of food
where fishermen of my
acquaintance usually are thinking of a trophy
How wonderful to
think of Hla riding my bicycle to the river
With a fishing pole
Catching fish that
struggle to survive in slowly clearing water
Fish to feed his boys
who also like to catch and eat fish, as in Burma
In olden days and
even now sometimes we see
Milwaukee (?) blacks
and pore folks at the riverbanks and lakeshores
in Waukesha County
hunkered down,
usually, so as not to stand out
fishing “our”
recreational waters
for food, smiling
furtively beneath broad straw hat-brims
when they snag one
that would bring their hands
around in big O’s;
And well-to-do locals
motor by and cluck their tongues and say:
“Just look at that!”
Route Step
The bridge from Wheeling Island Ohio
across the Ohio
River
to Wheeling
West Virginia
was built before the Civil War
the first and oldest
continuously-operating such bridge
in the United States
Travelers on Route 70
pass over the Ohio
to the north
but within sight of the old bridge
which serves local traffic
and which is anchored
on the Wheeling
in tons
of cement beneath
our traditional stop-over hotel
on the annual way to the Maryland
So that shock waves of the bridge cables
are transferred slightly to our beds
and we're connected vibratorily
and there is no extra charge for
such magic finger treatment
I like to take an early morning walk
across the bridge each year on my trip
and I've noticed spider webs on the
supports
that mimic the fretwork of the
bridge itself;
and I've felt the sway of the bridge
in the wind, or when a car passes over
next to me on the narrow pedestrian walk
The water looks far below
and it is
During the Civil War
Union soldiers were marching in lock
step
across the bridge and they set up a
vibration that caused one of the three
instances
when bridge has collapsed;
those calamities happened during
the bridge's earlier life;
it hasn't fallen in a long time
proponents say
But that's when the broken march step
came to be, known as Route Step
to any soldier or parade marcher,
because the ordered but free-form paces,
out of pounding rhythm,
- no LEFT! RIGHT! LEFT! -
kept the Wheeling
^,^
Soldiering
I saw a picture in a newspaper yesterday
of Russian children being taught in a classroom
about gasmasks
and I thought
how wrong that is.
A good share of my now 80 year life
has been given up
to reflecting on how wrong things are.
When I was a child people's bodies
were being shredded, blown apart
in World War Two
not a glorious war but one that had to be won
and my bandage-winding, sweater-knitting
Red Cross costume-wearing paternal grandmother
with her progeny, four sons, all in the war
would dress me in military costume
and her heart would swell with pride when
I looked like a little soldier, like one of her sons
on her front lawn in Cedar Falls , Iowa
but it never felt right to me
and when with my dad then Captain Dix we traveled from
military post to military post as he trained
for the ultimate D-Day invasion with the 90th
I shied from ceremonial cannon firing
I think I shamed him by holding my ears
and not liking the sharp sting of gunpowder
in my nose which I remember well.
Children come into this world with
a purity that is wrested from them -
the Russian children had that look
that look of something not being right;
Who wants to stand next to a blasting cannon
Who wants to wear a uniform for play
and what does it say to teach little boys and
girls
about death being in the air they breathe?
Mental disorders, poisoned brain cells
a fetid pond in which to swim
for Earth's minnows
it fosters irregular heartbeats and earns
us failing marks
with the cosmos:
in this holy sea a spoiled estuary.
