Poetry, Part Five

Last year was the 30th anniversary of my resignation from the Air Force. I had every intention of simply letting the year pass by peacefully. No trip to the Academy to reminisce. No private observance. I wasn't going to get out any memorabilia or reread any poems. Nothing. It was all 30 years before and my life had moved forward. I was over all of it, I told myself, especially since President Obama was likely, now with the support of many military officials, to repeal DADT and allow gays to serve openly, at long last.

As what typically happens in such matters, fate stepped in and decreed something else: A pipe broke in our storage room and, as all of my items in that space were in cardboard boxes, everything that I had saved from my Marine OCS days and Air Force OTS days and Air Force years, including the Academy, was sprayed or soaked. Little had been untouched.

I was forced to painstakingly remove each box, unload all of the varied contents, and separate out every piece of paper, booklet, pamphlet, item, object, whatever, and hope that they dried out and were not totally destroyed or stuck to other items and become fused together. Unfortunately, since I wrote so much of my experiences on paper with the kind of color pens that easily ran when wet, many journal pages and notes and scrawls were completely ruined. Some were only partially damaged. Fate had randomly eliminated some of what I had experienced, some of my memories, while preserving others completely.

I even found a paragraph/poem by Philip Levine that I had written down by hand and that had obviously resonated with me then (and does even more now): "Once, as a boy, I climbed the stairs in a sleeping house and entered a room no one used. I found a trunk filled with post cards and letters from a man who had traveled for years and then came home to die. In the moonlight each one said the same thing: how long the nights were, how cold it was so far away, and how it had to end."

So, whether I had intended to or not, I was forced by a burst pipe to review the distant past and make a bit of sense of it all, all over again. The poetry I wrote in those days was another artifact that certainly needed revisiting:

Camouflage

In homes,
away from public buildings,
in the hills overlooking a chapel,
and hushed behind partitions,
we speak of freedom
and rights
as in tones of voices
heard just before waking.

We are masters when disguised;
trained in codes
as secretly as spies. We subvert
as love is treason here
as no one knows.

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