Dennis Trudell

DANCER

2009-08-24T18:57:00.002-05:00

I'm imagining a man who taught
himself to soft-shoe on death row.
And he's doing that right now.
It keeps him more or less sane
and helps him sleep. Guards no

longer pause and shrug -- maybe
their breaths or pulsebeats still
move nearer his rhythm, but
he keeps walking. The next cell
holds a man who just stares

into his palms, and that also
changes guards' pulses. The man
past that will grin and shout,
"Have a good day!" to make
something flinch. But this man

who taught himself to dance
from tapes, from books. . . . Soft-
shoe on that prison cement:
it sounds like quick whispers,
a half-stifled cough. Guards

think they no longer hear it.
It sounds like waves having
arrived now retreating on sand.
He turns, turns again. Faces
north. West. Faces me. You.

AGE 92

2009-08-24T15:59:00.006-05:00

My father wouldn't watch the war in Iraq as he was dying.
He didn't want television on that first week in the hospital, the
week at a nursing home, , the week back in the same hospital
room, those last five days before eternity at another nursing
home. He had designed tails and cockpits of fighter planes for
Curtiss-Wright Aircraft during World War II. "Wish I'd had
nothing to do with that: war," he said more than once as he
was saying his goodbyes.

He'd been sent to England in 1941 to help oversee the
assembling of planes Curtiss sent by convoy; he was there
during Pearl Harbor. I have a memory of air-mail stationary
and my mother reading his words for me. The was helped
them buy a home, then another, larger home in a suburb --
and my father, who hadn't graduated from high school, sent
two sons to private colleges.

I rode a bus for eighteen hours to march against this Iraq
War before my father's inability to swallow led to a final
mattress, on a floor with alarm because he kept struggling off
it as his brain was ending. I passed television images of
bombing and tanks, desert fatgues, rubble on my way to and
from his shrinking weight, his grin without dentures, his gasps
to breathe . . . his regret about a war that helped pay for me
beginning to learn we are all combatants. All losing.

LENGTHENING SHRIEK

2008-04-28T03:17:00.002-05:00

In history classes they didn’t tell me
how red, red, blood is in the streets.
They didn’t tell me in junior high school
or high school because they didn’t know?
Maybe that’s true. Why didn’t they?: blood,

fresh blood, has been that red since long
before rockets and bombs, long before guns.
They didn’t tell me how much blood,
red as a God’s lengthening shriek, bursts
from the dead and wounded onto cement

and asphalt, walls, cobblestones, steps, dirt,
bread. . . . They didn’t tell me in college,
because there too they didn’t know? Did
they tell me and I didn’t hear?: why was
it never flesh I imagined those dozens

of bombs from planes in newsreels falling
rather prettily toward when I was young
and my country was at war, again? They
should’ve said, “Redder than nay flag.” And
that it can be rinsed from the intersection,

the square, the charred hole with pipes,
wires, sinks, bedsprings -- and from history
texts and lectures, quizzes. Yet the red
bursts again as flowers in the gardens
of those who win wars, and think they

win the right to never know, or forget or
keep secret, how red blood is in the streets.

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THE PEOPLE

2008-04-28T03:16:00.004-05:00

through metaphor to reconcile

the people and the stones

-- W. C. Williams

Time and rain beat the stones.
Time and rain beat the stones
and the people there. The people
and the stones. Words and fish

moved with the people from year
to year, from childhood to death.
There by the sea. The people
and the words. Time and rain

beat them, and the words made
fish dance and stones children.
Waves moved with the poems
and stories from death to death,

from love to absence. The people
and the stones. And the music
of waves and sorrow and hope.
And the music inside the stones.

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