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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