Maine, Beyond Quantico

I wrote a poem about my two weeks in Maine, but I still did not have a camera to take pictures.  As I look back, I am not certain that I initially intended to return to Quantico to see the others graduate.  However, there were no job prospects in Maine, nor did I have a place to stay beyond those two weeks or so.  It simply seemed an interesting thing to do, to see the others graduate since we had all spent so many crucial weeks of our lives together.

Maine, Beyond Quantico

Although time-lengths of light
may be the barrier of our physical dip
                                  into the outer darkness,
will we recognize alternate escape for the coming end?

In the woods of the world,
colorless motion angles through muted green chimes,
easing leaves down the levels of gravity's shelves.

With the full of the sun,
will our falling settle when to await?
And will charred cells remember
and never suffer with their ringing stalks--
all forgotten in the way of frozen liquid?

Should ice ever disengage, and a thaw retain,
then we may find us up reversing roots
that catch a cycling earth in time
to repeat.

Besides the beauty of the woods of Virginia and of Maine, when I experienced the coming of spring in each place as the season worked its way up the Eastern Seaboard, in Maine, as I would later discover at OTS in Texas, it was the bugs.  I'd had never seen so many insects before.  The first week I arrived in Maine, I was able to walk in the woods undisturbed.  By the second week there, the bugs about killed me.  They swarmed everywhere and I could no longer take a comfortable stroll.

The other problem is that while I was no longer getting the exercise that I had gotten at Marine OCS, my appetite was still the same.  I was always hungry.  Initially, after I returned to California, I got heavy, about 185 pounds.  But a series of colds that summer and fall caused me to lose all that I had gained and I was back down to my regular 160-165.

I went back to work at A.U. Morse & Company, though I moved into the office to take wallpaper orders instead of filling them in the warehouse.  It was a bad move.  Our new office manager was a gay guy who was fey.  My stress level increased, working in the office.  When I tried to join, first the Coast Guard, and then the Air Force, my blood pressure levels were up and down.  I wanted to take a week off before I took my next test.  The office manager sent me a letter in the mail, terminating me.  I applied for unemployment insurance.  When A.U. Morse tried to counter my claim, I showed the unemployment rep the letter and he immediately granted my claim.  I did not have to worry about income for the next few months until I figured out what I wanted to do with my life and my future.

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