Poetry, Part Forty-one

I experienced my first physical, for the draft, at the Wilshire Blvd. draft center in early 1972. A Marine Corps physical, which was much more pleasant, occurred at the same center, also in early 1972. I was given a Coast Guard physical in one of their facilities in San Pedro, CA, later that same year. In 1973, I had my first Air Force physical out at March Air Force Base near Riverside, CA. So, I had endured plenty of physicals before I entered active duty.

In addition, being involved with nuclear weapons, we were required to have random drug testing at Minot several times over the four years I was stationed there. After my impending discharge from the Air Force at the Academy, I had to have a physical in the first floor of the academic building. The officer who was tasked with my physical seemed disgusted when he read on my report why I was being discharged. He told me that he would try to make it as quick as possible as he drew the curtains of his large office that had a view in three directions, toward the library and the grass parade field below.

Because of where this poem was placed in the final volume, NO SECOND SAIL (like SONS OF MEN, a phrase from an A.E. Housman poem), I doubt if the poem was written in response to that final military physical, but it might as well have been written after that one.

The Physical

It will have been years ago
from each naked humiliation to this:
At the various layers of peace and war,
we come to our own inspection.
And so we are fitted.
The chilling of nerves
where stainless floors numb us together,
even flesh becomes official
when bare before each counting army.
Our bodies tremble,
but our feet are firm to orders where we stand.
So often waking to this
(but never like cattle),
we are the finer breed:
Nothing scars and our petty deformities
and are insulted.

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