Poetic Passages in Rainbow Arc of Fire: Autumn Saga

Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow has always been a favorite Halloween tale of mine for decades. When I wrote Autumn Saga, I knew that I had to work that tale into my own Halloween story in some way. The following chapter was the first of several paying homage to the scary "monsters" of literature and classic film. I tried in each chapter to see each character's psychological motivation or a less obvious Raison d'etre.

Chapter Forty-three

Something must be amiss, for this is not what the gathered multitude had in mind for Halloween.

Each individual in the audience suddenly finds himself abandoned by a country church, sitting astride a blackened horse amid a country graveyard, the Pavilion having completely vanished. Friends and family members and neighbors sitting beside them on the lawn a few moments ago have instantly disappeared. Home and hearth are now mysteriously supplanted in the mist of their unsettled memories, as if our modern age has not yet taken place.

The serrated moon in the night sky ominously hangs above like a luminous coat that has been left in an otherwise empty closet. Every person present realizes that he or she has unwittingly assimilated a new identity. A seductive voice from deep inside their curious minds now addresses this altered consciousness:

The tombs of these dead round about you are sealed against your admittance. Your kind is refused entrance merely because you fought as a mercenary—on the wrong side—in the late Colonial war. A stray cannonball severed your fate, and here you stand, with no settled grave to call your own.

These vague forms that you sense nearby cannot actually be seen by you. You cannot hear nor taste of the world any longer, cannot conventionally reason, other than with what restless motives guide your pulsing heart or your dangling limbs, all which physically remain of you. Sitting challenged in the saddle, you have suddenly materialized without benefit of a head.

The infernal forces that rule your troubled soul must be buried deep within your genetic makeup, your personal programming, if you will. This tormented psyche provides your sole motivation to be out each bewitching night, on a dark quest. Relentless dawn and the covered bridge are your only parameters.

You still have feelings, however. Starkly aware of your own shortcomings, you are startled to learn that you will be granted no final rest until you take from another that which you so severely lack.

Any other head will do. Without a discriminating residue in your anatomy, you are the proverbial condemned man, out to decapitate another for your own benefit.

Soon, along the wayward path by a crumbling stone wall, you sense a nervous trespasser on a dappled nag, clopping closely by. Alert, you stalk him quietly, slipping between full tombs and the old stone tabs that the living inevitably keep on their cherished dead.

In some farmer's autumn field nearby, a small plot of barely cultivated ground, a wary scarecrow flaps a dire warning. A novel breeze pushes the tattered pant legs up to his very knees of straw, yet all of these frantic gestures go unheeded. Without a rugged stake stuck up his pliant back, this spectral figure might give his own ragged garments leave to flee up the corn rows and be out of this fatal vicinity. But like you, he cannot escape this virtual reality.

Unlike this passing traveler, unwary but pursued now, you slowly shadow his slower motion around the various shafts of moonlight, until his precious ears pick up the persistent echoes of your horse's step, more insistent than those of his own rough mount. He has been forewarned of your mission, however. Town gossips on a howling evening have told familiar stories, dreadful tales of terrifying nights like this.

Thus alerted, he picks up the pace of his retreat; but his way is soon lost in these deep woods.

You lift the blade of his demise high in your sordid hand and then thunder hard after. He flails to get away, but you are soon at his side. Slashing at air again and again, your impatient thrusts miss repeatedly. His precious skull ducks too desperately and foils your every attempt at its swift condemnation.

The immediate road ahead breaks right and left. This night the pursued chooses right and the covered bridge looms fast ahead, certain sanctuary on the other side. Before you can recover and cut him off, his fleeing sounds reverberate off of the wooden slats and beams, and the emerging victor pulls up to gloat down the sure tunnel of his escape.

In frustration, you hurl the carved and flaming orb, with an aim truer than either one of you expected from a flying pumpkin. But was your furious aim true enough?

No one alive quite knows for certain.

The deceased author, Mr. Irving, left broken, pulpy shards on the morning ground, a few hoof prints, and a bowed, borrowed nag grazing some distance away, riderless. Yet unconfirmed rumors abound of your prey's escape, Mr. Crane having wisely relocated to a safer village.

The conclusion does flirt, though, with your victory. So you are left with at least a slim possibility that you may finally find eternal peace, however discontented you might eventually be. Eternally lodged in a confining coffin, you see, your body would suddenly become a slave once again to the fickle rule of a head. No longer subject to its own demands, your corpse would now be forced to contend with someone else's.

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Poetic Passages in Rainbow Arc of Fire: A Mile-High Saga

My next several posts will feature a sample chapter from each Rainbow Arc of Fire novel, in order. These are sections of chapters or passages from each novel that I feel were especially influenced by the poetry I wrote in the previous decades. The chapter below from the first novel occurs after Greg has acquired his superior ablities. He sees the world about him with new eyes, in new ways. He has returned to the place where his life took an unfortunate direction fifteen years earlier, and he means to make a difference when he was unable to earlier.

Chapter Twenty-one

Especially in the early 1950’s, this pristine wilderness that soon enough was built up into the various U.S. Air Force Academy structures, traditions, and facilities must have been incredibly beautiful, vitally untouched as it was back then. So much is pristine still, and virtually unoffending, as it nestles into the wide landscape as Greg exits the freeway.

The several Academy roads are meticulously paved, the shoulders perfectly manicured. Pines and shrubs and thick, wild brush loiter everywhere, unmoved and undisturbed these many years.

The hills here roll massively upward at a slow grade until, finally, Rampart Range rides straight up to the sky. One can almost hear the ancient, volcanic eruptions that pushed these heights up through the Earth’s crust to where they now reside, triumphant.

Yet the stillness of an airless moon envelops this entire locale. Dark clouds can mass silently behind this protective range of mountains until the heady gray formations push themselves up over the tops of the various peaks; and a thunderstorm, fully unfurled, rages on an otherwise peaceable summer’s afternoon.

Nature is allowed far greater leeway here. Headlights that are flashed during the day at oncoming cars are intended to warn of deer docilely gathered ahead, for wildlife is fully protected here.

No matter the phantom pain that Greg still feels, as if from a severed limb, he has always loved this place. Arriving as he has before too many unknowing tourists invade for the day, he turns the hood of his car toward the Overlooks.

From this remarkable vantage point, the several athletic fields that spread out below currently lie fallow in their off-season. Graduation having occurred several days earlier, the doolies, the new Academy freshmen, are not due to arrive for a few more days yet. A number of cadets are still in residence, however, in numerous summer programs....

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Took a couple of breaks

I've missed a day or two posting recently.

Last Sunday was my 11th annual Pride Parade Party here in Denver. The parade leaves Cheesman Park and passes by in front of my house. I might as well have a party. Preparation takes a great deal of time and effort. This year I had more help than usual, but I was still busy. It's always difficult to know exactly how many guests I have each year, but last year and this the consensus is that the number who were here was over 50.

Friday afternoon, I got a rejection letter for a history teaching job that I applied for a few weeks ago. These days with so many people out of work and so many looking for jobs, especially in teaching, if you don't match their requirements exactly, you are eliminated immediately, no matter how good you might be or how much experience you have.

My Master's Degree is in the Humanities. This job mandated that an applicant have a Master's degree in history (my B.A. degree is history). Now, most of the courses I took were either English or history. And even a few of the English courses had a strong history basis. I made that clear in my cover letter, but they could easily eliminate me for that technicality.

In addition, though, from 1980-1991, I taught history, English, humanities, literature, and communications part time for Pikes Peak Community College. So I have had a broad background teaching. I even got a secondary teaching certification in English during 1988-9.

Not only have I written the Rainbow Arc of Fire series of novels in the past 16 years, I have also continued to read history books and biographies. Moreover, I was interviewed and mentioned in the late Randy Shilts's groundbreaking historical study: Conduct Unbecoming: Gays & Lesbians in the U.S. Military because of my experience at the U.S. Air Force Academy.

But beside the fact that my degree is not exactly what they asked for, a easy justification for rejecting my application early in the process, I also never attempt to hide the fact that I am gay. In addition, when a committee reads an application fully, it's obvious that, given when I graduated from junior college, I am likely around 60 years old. I also emphasize the fact that I was in the military during the Vietnam War era. Since my name is Sanchez, though my mother's side of the family was Irish, I also indicate that I am Hispanic (as well as white) because my grandfather emigrated from Spain in 1919. (My father's mother's family was German.)

So, while most of those experiences and qualities might make me an ideal candidate to teach history at a community college, they can just as equally be seen negatively:

I am too old. My teaching experience was too long ago. I am gay. I was in the military. Something must have happened at the Academy because I was there for one year only.

You'd be surprised at the prejudices even academics carry with them. And in a process such as the one I went through to apply, all they have to do is say, as they did, "At this time, we are pursuing other candidates that we feel are a better fit with the education, experience and skill set outlined in the job announcement."

I will never know if I was rejected because of my age, my military background, my being gay, or anything else that could be seen as blatant discrimination if the selection process were fully transparent.

These days, given the tight job market, any company or organization looking to hire must ensure that they cannot be sued by those whom they reject, for whatever the reason. So, you have to sign wavers indicating that you will not sue regardless of what they discover during the hiring process (they do extensive background checks now, almost equivalent to those I experienced when I joined the Air Force or needed security clearances for being a missile officer, when you are a finalist for a job).

In fairness to the community college where I applied, they likely have the ideal candidate already picked out to hire, though they must pursue this open hiring process, regardless. When I worked for Pikes Peak Community College, and they finally had one English Department job opening late the decade, while I had taught for them for years, they had a woman who taught at the main campus part time. They knew her well and wanted to hire her. They did not know me well because I taught English classes for them at Fort Carson, nearby. They indicated that she had taught a few more English classes than I had, and that was the sole criteria they used to select her over me.

I was not given credit for being a Vietnam Era veteran; they did not know I was gay; they did not count the nine English classes I taught at the Air Force Academy, nor the literature class I taught in 1980 for Chapman College; and I was not hired because I had an Hispanic background and last name. They also did not count any of the humanities, history, or communications classes I taught for Pikes Peak Community College during that same period of time. It might seem to any outsider that the selection process was rigged.

They apparently wanted to hire the woman they knew, and so they identified and focused their hiring criteria to favor her application over mine.

The community college that I recently applied for probably also has one or two (or more) applicants whom they know and from among whom they intend to hire their one new instructor. A unknown outside applicant like myself really has no chance for serious consideration. I don't particularly blame them, but it does rather make a mockery of the "open" and transparent hiring process when it really isn't open nor transparent.

Last year I got the same rejection notice from the same college when I applied for a full time English teaching job. A couple of years ago, I also applied, at the same college, for part time history teaching jobs, just so they would know who I was. In all cases, I was not hired. Regarding the full time English job, I got the same generic rejection notice.

What surprised me most with the English teaching job is that not only have I taught English from 1978-1991, but I have been a technical writer and editor for several companies from 1980 until now, most recently at IBM from 1991. I would dearly have loved to see whom they hired. He or she must have been a phenomenal applicant to have beaten me out with my secondary certification, teaching experience, and professional writing experience of 30 years. That doesn't even take into consideration my being a published writer of ten novels and 100 poems. Not only have I taught for a community college, I attended a junior college. But none of that was enough to even be considered as a finalist for any of these few job openings.

These rejections are, obviously, a major disappointment. When I lived in Colorado Springs, I taught part time classes continuously. But when my full time job as a technical writer and editor ended, and there were no full time teaching jobs available, I had to move to Denver. I never realized that my teaching experience there wouldn't count for much here. My work at IBM during the day, and then later my writing of the Rainbow Arc of Fire novels, took up all my free time. It was difficult to summon the energy to teach in the evenings while working full time during the day at the same time I was also writing and publishing a series of novels.

And, of course, nobody could have foreseen that in several states such as California, thousands of full time teachers were going to be laid off, clogging the job market with educated and experienced people looking for work. I simply have to hope that my full time job at IBM, even with the 20 percent pay cut a year and a half ago, holds up until something else comes along. I am not all that close to retirement right now.

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Favorite Poem: Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe

When I attended East L.A. Junior College in 1967-9, in Monterey Park, CA, located not far from the Huntington Library, we were required to visit the library and write about something significant we saw there. Besides the well-known paintings of Pinkie and Blue Boy (which my mom had on a deck of playing cards at the time), there was also a copy, in Poe's own beautiful hand, of his poem Annabel Lee.

At about the same time that I discovered the poem in the glass case, I was introduced to Joan Baez's albums. In her 1967 album Joan, she sang a lush and quaint rendition of Annabel Lee set to music. So the poem had meaning to me for two reasons.

I have not been to the library in many years, but it used to be a place in the late 60's and 70's that I visited periodically. The grounds alone were worth the modest price of admission.

"It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;"

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Favorite Poems: Unknown

Decades ago, I came across an article in the L.A. Times about several Southern California poets which contained samples of their writing. I do not know if I still have that article. Therefore, I cannot give writer credit or even titles to the lines I recall below. Perhaps someone can find them on the Internet, though I have tried unsuccessfully, so far.

The first was a one-line poem about the Watts ghetto:

"Every plant that comes here dies."

The second is a line from a poem about Los Angeles itself:

"She loved me loose and large in the afternoon,
all out of proportion."

Both lines of poetry have stuck with me over the decades like the Philip Levine poem, three decades ago.

When I was at the Academy and was buying a home for the first time, I was drawn to a brand new development on Cimmeron Hills in Colorado Springs. One house in particular I could not resist. You could see Pikes Peak even from the basement window. After I moved in, I noticed a women had moved into the house directly below mine. One afternoon she was sitting on her patio with a gray Scotty dog at her side. Later, at a meet and greet gathering for the English Department to introduce us five new instructors, that same woman came up to me and introduced herself as my new neighbor.

I later learned that Gina was lesbian, as well as a new English instructor like me, and she had selected her house as far away as possible from the Academy for privacy. She was distressed to learn that I was her neighbor until she eventually figured out that I was gay.

It was a rough assignment for both of us, what with my forced resignation. She also had problems with members of the department who gave her a less-than-stellar evaluation. She left the Academy after only three years by mutual consent, and she and I also had a falling out for several reasons that no longer seem important.

The afternoon of the day I resigned, she and her mother, who was visiting, took me to dinner at a local restaurant to help me forget my situation for a couple of hours at least. While I was still living in Colorado Springs, she returned with her partner and we had dinner at a different restaurant several years later and talked about old times.

She was the one who told me that two other women in the English Department were lesbian. She also told me when they hired a guy who was a real flamer to replace me for the next academic year. When I moved, we lost contact. She likely retired from the Air Force two decades ago.

The reason I think of her is that I once told her, because of her continuous trouble with growing house plants, that she should have that one poem about plants made into a plaque and installed above her front door. She was always having them die on her. Of course, the plants in the poem are a metaphor for those human beings who live in the ghetto and do not thrive. But, for her, literally, her house plants had a rough time and a low survival rate under her roof.

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Favorite Poem: The Vacuum by Howard Nemerov

Choose an object associated with a beloved, even something very ordinary, and then recall how much you miss that person, especially if that object is still there to remind you, even berate you. Here, Nemerov selected a vacuum cleaner. And, obviously, the name has a double meaning.

This was another poem I enjoyed teaching to my students in the 80's at Fort Carson.

"The house is so quiet now
The vacuum cleaner sulks in the corner closet,
Its bag limp as a stopped lung, it mouth
grinning into the floor...."

His conclusion can certainly impact anyone who experiences significant loss:

"And still the hungry, angry heart
Hangs on and howls, biting at air."

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Favorite Poem: For the Anniversay of My Death by W.S. Merwin

When I taught this poem to several of my English classes at Fort Carson from the literature book we used, I always found the concept intriguing. We know the date when we were born; we do not know the date that will eventually be the one set in stone when we die.

All those headstones I have seen in military and civilian cemeteries have a starting date and an ending date. My mom's in the White Cloud, Kansas, cemetery. My grandparents--her parents--also buried there beside her. My uncle and my cousin buried in the San Joaquin Valley National Cemetery in California where I have gone the past three years to take my aunt for her annual Memorial Day visit.

"Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star...."

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Favorite Poem: Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

War poetry obviously appeals to me, and Wilfred Owen wrote many while serving with the British Army at the front during World War I before he was killed, not long before the armistice ended that long, bloody war.

"Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood shod. All went lame, all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
of gas shells dropping softly behind."

Obviously, too, as with the concluding line in Latin translated, it is NOT sweet and fitting to die for one's country.

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Favorite Poem: Success Is Counted Sweetest by Emily Dickenson

When I attended East Los Angeles Junior College from September 1967 until June of 1969, I was fascinated by the college bookstore. When I had time, I browsed through the store incessantly. Besides the required books for my several courses each semester, I was amazed at the other books there, especially the paperback poetry volumes and anthologies, many of which were edited by Oscar Williams. I bought at least three which I still have: American Verse from Colonial Days to the Present (75 cents), Immortal Poems of the English Language (90 cents), and Major British Poets ($1.75).

While those prices may seem meagre by today's standards, you must remember that, as a senior in high school, working at a rod and gun club, I made but $1.25 per hour, which was taxed, of course. Then when I was at East L.A., I made $1.35 per hour at the wallpaper warehouse where my father worked as a wallpaper salesman on the road.

I became familiar with so many poets such as Housman and Frost and, of course, Emily Dickinson, while pouring through those books.

Sometimes I wonder if this poem of hers does not reflect my entire life. From very early on, I read this poem and it strongly resonated. I would not realize until later how much it would continue to resonate. My failed military career, my continued failure to meet the right someone, my failed literary career, my failure to obtain a job that I really enjoyed doing such as teaching.

So it always would seem to be that she captured those feelings with the first two lines:

"Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed."

Perhaps success is actually counted by having simply endured, despite the failures and the lack of overall success financially or personally or professionally.

I suppose we each have to discover for ourselves if we have succeeded in life or not.

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Favorite Poem: Advice to a Prophet by Richard Wilbur

Obviously, after the advent of nuclear weapons, apocalyptic poems became more prevalent. Here, Richard Wilbur speaks of his vision about someone who might tell the world the direction it is headed in the nuclear age:

"Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange."

He could have been a combat crew commander, as I later was, when he wrote those lines. Because, for most people in the world, I don't believe they could ever really imagine a post-nuclear-war world. A world that is without us humans, regardless of how it became depopulated and barren of human life.

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Favorite Poem, The Groundhog by Richard Eberhart

The Groundhog has often been anthologized because it is a powerful poem. It reminds us of our own mortality in the face of the death of an animal in nature. Exploring that same theme, Richard Wilbur wrote The Pardon about his feelings for his own dead dog. I wrote that poem of mine, Trapping Animals, about the rabbit that the site enlisted personnel were trying to kill with rocks inside the LCF fence. One of my favorite writers, E. B. White, wrote a short story called The Death of a Pig about his having to deal with a farm animal that was ill and dying.

Each of these literary works is powerful because it deals with a writer's profound feelings about death, the most significant event for all living things.

In his poem Eberhart writes about the stages he goes through over three years' time, as he deliberately, or by chance, comes upon the spot where he first discovered the dead body of the groundhog. His feelings alter over that time from powerful emotions to almost complete indifference as his intellect takes hold.

"It has been three years, now.
There is no sign of the groundhog."

But, fortunately, the author realizes his mistake and his empathy is made universal:

"My hand capped a withered heart,
And I thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament."

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Favorite Poem by Philip Levine

When I learned of the leak that had damage several cardboard boxes filled with memorabilia from my days at Marine OCS and the Air Force in Minot and at the Academy, I had to rescue them, separate the many soaked items, and allow them to dry. One of the pieces of paper that I came across was the following that I had written down over 30 years ago. It had miraculously not been damaged even though it was written in the kind of ink that smeared easily upon contact with water. Obviously, the words resonated with me back then; and I must have realized that, someday perhaps, what Philip Levine had written about that traveling man would apply to me.

"Once, as a boy, I
climbed the attic stairs
in a sleeping house
and entered a room
no one used. I found
a trunk full of letters
and post cards from a man
who had travelled for years
and then come 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."

I had joined the Air Force, traveled to San Antonio, then Minot, and Vandenberg, back to Minot, to Columbus, Ohio, and, finally, to my last assignment in Colorado Springs. There I was released and abandoned. I had almost no friends who were also not in the Air Force and could afford to still remain friends with me. I was alone and lonely in my new house where I was having trouble making my house payment every month and paying the electric bill. But I eventually found a full time job after I had gotten the part time evening jobs teaching at Fort Carson and then Peterson Air Force Base. I was struggling but I was surviving.

But nothing of what had happened to me made sense. I had seemed destined for a military career and writing my poetry and my journals as a closeted gay officer. I never conceived that I would have the life that almost forced me to write about what had happened in an autobiography and then a series of failed novels and, eventually, after moving to Denver over a decade later, would compel me to write the Rainbow Arc of Fire series.

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Favorite Poem: The Dial Tone by Howard Nemerov

The Dial Tone is about a technological entity that has become like eternity, or existence, with its perpetual presence. In a way it outlives its creators. Humans may have created it, but they do not even interrupt it or alter it by their use of the phone:

"I do not doubt that if you gave it hours
and then lost patience, it would be the same
After you left that it was before you came."

Obviously, to Nemerov it's a metaphor for something far greater. Poets are meant to see the familiar in unfamiliar ways.

Favorite Poet: A.E. Housman

A. E. Housman was the poet of my youth. He often wrote about death and dying young. For young men of my era, his poems especially resonated, though I am not sure anyone other than I was reading his poetry. I bought THE COLLECTED POEMS OF A. E. HOUSMAN in college and carried it everywhere with me. I also bought a biography, A DIVIDED LIFE, that speculated, using his poetry, that Housman was gay.

Eventually, during my Master's Degree in the Humanities, I took an independent study course in which I discussed three British poets who became associated with WWI: A. E. Housman, Rupert Brooke, and Wilfred Owen, who was also likely gay.

From A SHROPSHIRE LAD, my favorite line from Reveille: "Clay lies still, but blood's a rover; / Breath's a ware that will not keep. / Up, lad: when the journey's over / There'll be time enough to sleep."

From the same first collection, my favorite line from XXII: "What thoughts at heart have you and I / We cannot stop to tell; / But dead or living, drunk or dry, / Soldier, I wish you well."

Also from A SHROPSHIRE LAD, my favorite line from XXXIII: "If truth in hearts that perish / Could move the powers on high, / I think the love I bear you / Should make you not to die."

From the introduction poem to MORE POEMS: "They say my verse is sad: no wonder; / Its narrow measure spans / Tears of eternity, and sorrow, / Not mine, but man's."

Also from MORE POEMS, VII: "Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-strewn sky."

The most revealing of his poems, from MORE POEMS, XXXI: "Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say, / It irked you, and I promised / To throw the thought away."

The poem where I took the title of my volume of poetry, from LAST POEMS, from XXXIV The First of May: "For oh, the sons we get / Are still the sons of men."

His poetry got me through some very tough years in college especially, dealing with being gay. I had had one-sided crushes on two straight college chums: first Daylin at East LA JC and then Pat at Cal State Dominguez Hills. I somehow intuitively sensed that Housman had had similar, unrewarded longings in Victorian England where a man could be imprisoned for expressing such feelings. I would later, at the Academy teaching English, be reminded of how a similar punishment could swiftly and painfully follow being revealed as gay in the service.

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Favorite Poet: Richard Wilbur

One of my favorite poets is Richard Wilbur. I came across a review of his poem, The Mind Reader, in the LA Times and bought the book. I had already read his poem, Beasts, in an anthology called TODAY'S POETS for a college English class. I later taught his poem, The Writer, to my English classes at Pikes Peak Community College.

His diverse subject matter always fascinated me: an intellectual who could actually read minds and was the worse for it, a werewolf in the city at full moon, his daughter attempting to become a writer herself.

My favorite line from The Mind Reader is the first: "Some things are truly lost."

My favorite line from Beasts: "The ripped mouse, safe in the owl's talon, cries / Concordance."

My favorite line from The Writer: "It lifted off from a chair-back, / Beating a smooth course for the right window / And clearing the sill of the world."

His poems are always clear and concise, his words wondrous and precise. Poets and poetry are meant to be shared with classes and with friends. And with you now.

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Poetry, Part Sixty-two

With this final poem, my thoughts had evolved to cosmic proportions. The title alone is obviously in line with how I felt back then. I was working multiple jobs just to survive and keep my home. I had no boyfriend. AIDS was now a significant issue.

The power of poetry is in the eye and the mind of the reader. Writing, for me, as I said, was therapy. And I certainly used it and my journals as a writing apprenticeship for the time when I began to transition to writing books.

Revenge

Like Sampson blinded in chains
so he could see,
I imagine me many times
toppling the Academy.

Not with dynamite
nor insurrection,
I would with my own ability
crush it,
to remind of human suffering
and our mortality--
of rights they so permanently wrong.

Someday we exiles will revenge our humility
when we did not fight
but do not forget.


We have six opportunities, so imagine with me...


The worst case makes makes us wait
some billions of years,
as Man both spiritually and physically abandons earth.
Without salvation in our space,
the sun, aged in waiting, now expands.
All monuments are quickly melted and perfected.


A double cure has us await our twin potential...



Pollux: The purity we only imperfectly imagine
spirits us through.
Charitably saving the chapel,
We mutually dismantle our militaries.
Cadets conceived only to perfect Peace
pass through the corridors in joyous procession.
No condemning them in our conversion.

Castor: Man launches his limiting quakes.
Unnatural fire, to devastate,
does not purify, and then sterilizes.
We have the promise to end all war.
All surfaces flash,
when flashing past,
and the last are gone.


Another opportunity, imaginable, but not likely...



We are finally, convincingly,
flattered from space.
Whether coming to conquer or convert us
(as we expect),
they reorganize Man along their lines.
They have us not needing the Academy--
far too small or unnecessary.
Either way,
with relationships forced to change,
we collaborate.


We could pray for Biblical Prophecy...



Justice finally divined on Earth.
Princely light from the heavens illuminates:
the brightness reveals and reminds our souls
of our eternal similarities.
Nature is the wonder--
working purposefully--
planning as we people or contract.
Personalities are our varied infinity,
balancing us as a species.


Our last possibility is how not when...



We are sons and daughters
of women and men.
Each and all of us besieged
since awareness began.
The Academy is but another castle
where walls divide us
and doors deceive.
Freedom dims from fortresses dug in.
So we mine continuously
when you undermine.
Inside and out in our siege,
we speak at forums and at court;
when caught, we conspire to replace where we leave;
To denounce you as traitors we betray.
Whether you tolerate our differences
or do not, we await.


You may anticipate--
as time renews us,
you will lose.

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Poetry, Part Sixty-one

Writing poetry and keeping a journal had served as good therapy for more than a decade. Both would serve me well for a couple more years before I stopped writing either and segued to writing first an autobiography and then several autobiographical novels before I finally moved to Denver in 1991. It was only then and there that I began to conceive of the Rainbow Arc of Fire series and the several characters that I came to create and admire.

The following lengthy poem was certainly yet another attempt to come to grips with what had happened to me and how I would come to deal with it as I tried to adjust to being a civilian and struggling to work full time at one job while teaching two to five evenings a week and sometimes on Saturdays, to make ends meet. My new job at Kaman paid me only $13,500 per year while my previous Air Force salary had been over $17,000. I had barely retained my home after I left the service. Now I would have to work at two jobs, working many additional hours beyond a 40-hour week, and even take in roommates, to keep my home and my sanity in the aftermath.

Minorities

On a morning road
topping a hill to the present,
I see my past driven to distance,
poised over the mirror looking down.

Fate makes mistakes
when men conspire.

Like some wired disaster,
controlled and cascading
through my battered lives, I retreated.

Never one so seized
by regulations routinely permitted
to sever my career from me.

How can we inspire a man's honesty,
his sincerity, to catch him indecent?
All flesh is corrupt when we look without law,
and they looked far too long.

Our time only appears matured
when scoundrels are practiced with the past,
exposing those of us too different for now.

I remember...

Like some medieval monk,
I made pilgrimage to the machines underground.
Like penance I served for years,
to forge honor like armor on knights.

Does not one's purity, one's filial devotion,
cleanse one before any king?
My ratings, my location, my awards
protected neither my gallantry nor me.

Even brave men weep after capture
when fitted for life in chains.
In Warwick dungeon, I saw a smaller pit
within that larger pit, dug to the side.
In it they would fit a man to completely forget.

Sometimes I, too, felt so confined.
As my military records are now defined,
no one will ever look,
for a chivalric code seals and deflects.

But never were we enemies;
and war is too wide an excuse.
So how do you justify my imprisonment,
the limiting of my ability and my spirit?

I suspect, like Salem, like Hollywood, like Europe,
we must impermanently maim
one minority or another,
to struggle again as other names,
to mutilate anew.

This is our renewal
of permanent persecution,
permitted and powered by authority.

Our society does not damn a heretic publicly--
fire being an unfavorable means,
crucifixion too lengthy,
and committees too corrupt.

So I named no names.
My private testimony only turned against the betrayer.
Silence was my conspiracy, so we too betray.

But times will never be too different
for emotionally similar beings.
Events still grant us one opportunity.

Yet today's tormentors torture us in community
when they no longer cleave people so physically.
Many of us are permanently bribed and ill-advised
simply to slip out that side escape--
exiled to disguised disgrace.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The lies come to this:
if we don't tell,
they won't.

---

Poetry, Part Sixty

The Academy needed me back, briefly. In one of the more bizarre twists in the entire situation, after I had resigned and left the service, a few months later I was called and asked to come and testify in a one-on-one, closed-door interview regarding a student who had flunked an English class of mine the previous year. He attended my summer make-up class but, I believe, he did not show up after the first couple of classes and failed yet again. (Or perhaps he had barely passed that summer course but flunked the next English class he took from a different instructor the following year and was academically discharged from the Academy for numerous failures. I don't remember which occurred, all these years later.)

His dad was a prominent African-American Air Force officer and had wanted his son to attend USAFA. It was my opinion back then that his son didn't want to be in the service, regardless of his father's wishes, and never put much effort into his studies or writing papers or anything else academic even though he was an intelligent kid with a lot of potential. Somehow, his father found out about my discharge for being gay and was attempting to use that as a justification to get his son yet another chance to remain at the Academy. The authorities needed me to testify that I had not been prejudiced against this particular student and had given him the failing grade he had earned.

The fact that I had had several other African-American and black students--one young woman was from Jamaica and was amazed to learn that I owned many Bob Marley albums and loved his music--and that all of them had gotten A's or B's in my classes did not seem to enter into this situation. Vivette, in particular, was such a wonderful student and very supportive of me. She and her boyfriend stayed at my house for spring break when they could not afford to go home that year; and she also knew Cadet Bostic, who was in her cadet squadron. In fact, she was one of several students who testified that Bostic had told her the same stories that he told me, the same stories he had denied ever telling anyone when my attorneys interviewed him.

The following poem may have been about that particular return. Or it could have been about some other return. (I also returned three years later when my former students graduated in 1983.)

Easter Service

Some situations never want you back,
so you're unexpected.

When I have returned on occasion,
I am no advice and no spirit.

People have to sound
injustice for centuries
before others hear it.

Unnoticed,
I willed the clouds roll aside
my cave entrance
(a man has to make his own
resurrection these days).

But silver still buys betrayal,
so I want no troubling recognition as
I return as no flame, only flesh.

That's sufficient disguise in our time
of no demonstration.

Presence is enough of a rebel
as secrets remain so
as written.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-nine

What follows is my first and only poem about being in a gay bar.

You always imagine that you'll meet Mr. Right somehow but manage instead, if you're lucky, to meet Mr. Right Now. All these years later, I realize that the bars were not, for whatever reason, the place to meet the right person for an LTR, at least for me anyway. I have met some very good friends over the years in bars, but no one who even came close to becoming a life partner. The Internet hasn't been that much better either, at least for now.

I have known so many guys over the years who never had a problem meeting a man for a permanent relationship anywhere. I either met the wrong person, or the right person but at the wrong time. It happens. So it must have been me. And if I kept hearkening back in my novels to Paul, the interested cadet I met on the Cog Railway heading down Pikes Peak in the summer of 1984, I suppose I can be forgiven just a little for wondering if the man I let get away without figuring out how to give him my phone number was The One.

Reservations in Dim Light

Potential lovers
realized
are not what we seemed,
or they saw.
The progressive evening,
as it malingers,
raises and lowers appreciation--
rejects and is,
in turn,
rejected.
We tempt
to soften the cruelty of our inspection.
But, as brutal as we select,
we live a night as we are chosen
who cannot view the soul.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-eight

After my forced resignation from the Air Force and a prolonged unemployment, I didn't feel good about myself for quite some time. When I finally was hired by Kaman Sciences on Garden of the Gods Road in Colorado Springs, my new co-workers didn't much like me either. However, as the months progressed, I slowly won them over.

One way that I did so involved the radio station they listened to during work hours. The station had numerous contests involving cool prizes such as movie passes and other such prizes. Another involved giving away $1,000.00 per week for a total of $10,000.00 over ten weeks with weekly drawings at local area participating merchants.

For the lesser contests, I fed them answers to trivia questions. For the money drawing, we got really organized by at least one of us listening to the radio station at all hours and reporting to the others if their names or a friend's name was called. When you called the radio station, you or your friend were registered for the weekly drawing. We realized that some contestants were stuffing the ballot boxes at local area merchants. So we began to stuff the ballot boxes with regularity and incredible efficiency. Our names were being drawn repeatedly as a result, and we were calling back to be registered for the next drawing several times a day. In the final six weeks of the contest, my roommate won, then I won, then a friend of Linda, my co-worker, won, and finally a friend of Rich, my other co-worker, also won. We were great chums at that point.

It wasn't a miracle cure by any means, but it did help to recover my own self-esteem.

Social Leveling

I should have sided with the ape,
batting airplanes around.
But I thought of the tiny pilots
protecting little crowds below,
and I believed as I was told.
Knowing Fay Wray wasn't really in danger,
beautiful people were always saved
even before the phrase.

A man is raised to despise the bizarre
out of place.
So I cheered the falling ape
shot down.

Being in the wrong neighborhood,
improperly attired,
while climbing impossibly high
killed the beast.
That was the beauty of it.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-seven

The Thunderbirds are, along with the Blue Angels, the best known precision flying teams in the world. There have been, with both teams, unfortunate accidents resulting in death, often multiple deaths because of the nature of their close flying. Each member of each team must follow, and rely heavily upon, the lead pilot, even if that pilot has made a mistake.

I wrote the following two, related poems when each team experienced accidents in the 1980's. I was also influenced by a few other factors. Now that I was teaching history and humanities, as well as English and literature, part time at Fort Carson and Peterson Air Force Base for Pikes Peak Community College, I showed Thorton Wilder's OUR TOWN, the PBS production starring Ned Beatty and Hal Holbrook, to some of my classes. Throughout the 1970's, I'd read several books about the concept of "Life After Life", where those who had died but returned had learned from those on the other side that acquiring knowledge was our life's mission. I also learned that, to the ancient Greeks, sin was a lack of knowledge. So Oedipus was condemned for not knowing that he had killed his father and married his mother. All of these concepts and notions created a heady brew.

Thunderbirds

Ability also betrays.

And I am become perspective
as one once tethered,
like an Academy glider
too early released.

Performance is one's practice exposed,
as a crash is competition's moment
now ceased.

I fault the faith
we traditionally misplace in leaders.
Too committed to the lift
these equals provide,
we followers ride another's reference
into the ground.

Since we often exempt them from mistakes,
gravity awakens us to errors too late.

After roles push us
beyond technology and training,
who commands?
We yield responsibility,
so who controls?

Those who set the goals, fearing to follow,
command.
We who fear our own control should reconsider.


Blue Angel

Somewhere one significant hue
nosing down
is outreached.

I would have had him streaking upward,
delivered before impact;
but who I am to preach salvation?

Years ago I trimmed what wings I had,
tapering my turn to land,
feeling for flight unclean.

Unlike Em'ly once,
I keep unravelling back from the grave,
paused by my loving never saved.

Toward what purpose is the spiral,
do you know?
Escape is merely traveling postponed.

Is it learning that keeps us living,
do you think?
Linking worlds wound up and tinkered with?

Death is a tentative survival,
tailoring knowledge,
salvaging some.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-six

The Carter Administration went out, and the Reagan Administration came in. And the military was beefed up, more money spent, more weapons systems given the go-ahead. The Soviet military machine was again defined as a huge and growing menace for the U.S. even while they were still bogged down in Afghanistan. New bombers and new missiles and new weapons for the army were coming off the assembly lines or the design boards. While AIDS was about to devastate the world in its own horrific way, the U.S. was acting as if the Cold War was never going to end, and that it was going to keep raising the stakes, no matter the cost.

World Civilization 101

They want us to fear again for our defense.

In their lessons
we are taught to remember
past defeats of peoples without sufficient protection.

When the examples don't apply,
we whittle our memories to fit.
We are afraid.

But I read,
and remember when I teach,
that wars chop off the lengths of civilization.

The Assyrians, for example,
for whom war was god and weapons divine,
conquered for a time and were crushed.
It follows.

Yes, weapons have a way of cutting both ways
when in use. And
a weapon launched is a weapon lost for defense.
(More platitudes, I know,
and I have more.)

In our defense,
once when I was a part,
I watched missiles among the wheat fields of North Dakota.
And I asked myself then,
"How will the millions of survivors
survive without wheat?"
A few loaves won't feed the multitude it once did.

We are too many;
our weapons are too much;
and we war too often to thrive.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-five

Until the Clinton Administration and now the Obama Administration, the Supreme Court was the only government entity where we might have a chance for finally achieving something approximating equal rights. But, unfortunately, with Bowers v. Hardwick in 1986, that case was judged improperly by the court. Fortunately, seventeen years later, that misguided ruling was overturned. Justice Powell, the deciding vote, later admitted that his decision to join with the majority had been wrong. He had not known that one of his own law clerks was gay when he believed that he didn't know anyone who was gay. This was probably the most significant situation where being out and open about one's orientation would have helped our collective lives.

Supreme Court

We should not shake too surely
the dust from our development,
but time is leaning around betrayed.

I remind of those delayed
who, withered by regression,
still vaguely cling
like vegetation when we rake.

The wronged do long endure
as a crop we have forsaken for now.
Should we not each reap
when we all grow together?

How scorned will our production be
next to others who have forseen
the seasons better than we did?

Denied to some to grow,
the soil erodes from us all.
Our future, paused as told,
will judge us as we judge.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-four

After I resigned and left the Air Force, periodically the news featured stories about gay witch-hunts involving several gays or lesbians in one or another branch of the service. The Norton Sound was a navy ship where an extensive investigation and several discharges occurred. Often, the military investigative organizations used a kind of psychological torture on young, impressionable service personnel. They would threaten them by various means in the hopes that they'd break down and reveal the names of others. Such techniques would then widen the investigation as well as the numbers of discharges. Those investigations fed upon themselves.

As in my case, we often became our own worst enemies--with gay people subjecting one another to humiliating exposure and discharge. If we didn't turn on one another, more of us would have spent our military careers successfully and retired. Being older and more experienced, I knew not to help them at all. Except for ruining Cadet Bostic's testimony by casting doubts upon what he said and whom he exposed, I revealed nothing about anyone else at the Academy. What Bostic had viciously started stopped with him and me.

"Norton Sound"

Compacted like trash,
as resources are altered,
even blurred in detail,
and discharged.

As memory compresses,
only the rough survive the friction.
And the concern that seems retribution
is never sympathy.

To have been done with--
dropped off and forgotten.
Who shows conscience for discards
in discarded form?

I, too, believed the smiling--
so the stealth behind went undetected.
To it are downed any who care,
and they founder.

Sirens were simply the first to sing.

We believe every day;
and we lose when we listen.
Without any protection
we hear unchallenged voices.
Not just at sea.
So subtle are these today
who trick us in officious ways.

We drown,
and others are found to replace.

---

Poetry, Part Fifty-three

The following poem was written about my own forced resignation from the Air Force on October 12, 1979. My accuser, Cadet Bostic, was forced to quit the Academy a week earlier for lying repeatedly during the entire investigation.

It was a sad and even tragic experience for everyone involved. Nobody benefited, especially not the Air Force. Being an Air Force officer and an instructor at the Academy had been my first, best destiny and now it was over for good.

Discharging gay and lesbian service members--and it has been many thousands of us over the past several decades, beginning as long ago as WWI--has cost lives and millions and millions of dollars. We are not security risks. Our service does not impair morale, no more so than African-Americans serving, or Japanese-Americans serving, or Hispanic-Americans serving, or women serving. To prevent us from serving openly and to force us to resign when we are discovered is simply bigotry and intolerance and sometimes even blind ignorance.

If your religious beliefs prevent you from serving and working with gays and lesbians, then you need to consider a different career choice than military service because most religious Americans do not have a problem with gay and lesbian service members. The various branches of the military do not discriminate against religious beliefs as long as those beliefs do not interfere with military duties. Over the decades, the U.S. Armed Forces have been mandated to integrate various groups, and they have done so, though not without some friction and the passage of time.

We are American citizens. And our tradition of serving our country in peace and war has been long and effective, even serving in silence. That silence needs to end at long last.

Resignation

Who remembers runners in-between?
From the feet at the blocks
to the chest at the tape,
in a relay
those who neither start nor finish,
once having successfully passed,
simply vanish.

I was one of those blurs in the middle.
Now certain I am forgot.
Never dead, or even outran,
I am bent for breath unnoticed
on a turn farthest from view.

I made one mistake.

As the camera angled
from a close beginning to a closer end,
I was perfectly passing in the wide sweep
of no detail.

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