The Tree Surgeon's Gift (PDF)

The Lame Shall Enter First (p. 2)

His favorite of seven

daughtcrs, I nursed the oíd man,

dogridden and bedtired and soon

to die. His combative lungs

wheczed as a pair of leaky

bellows. I wondered at how those eyes

talked, gesturing, restless as wrens

inside Tom Cat`s yard. I turned the

pages of the family Bible, he seldom

strayed from Esdras: so much depends on

asylum, offered in thick woods,

hollows in the tidewrack. His mind

snatched four words in the space

God had permitted for one. He

sensed the lateness of summer: the smell of mown

vetch, the fence of wet sheets,

spired by a clothespole, slapping in a burst

of breeze. And in the stillbirth of the midnight,

he dreamt, God yes, dammit he did:

burning decks at sea, howling coves

along Dolly Sods, distressing faces in mirrors.

His eyes sank, looking like chalky

taws, and I knew it wasn`t the last

breath that undid him, but all those

unnoticed which had gone before it.

Lights Over Quantico, USMC

Summer`s lazy axis I think elucidated best my

father`s psyche: getting through the brief but

hot nights, he`d slump over the airy panes, cut

his bloodshot eyes toward the hushed and distant

margins of the Corps` timber. Did he grieve alone

for his choice made to slumber in a powdery boudoir,

dreaming of a carbine and a hammock to sling against Che?

The sentry in him read the starry horizons, paused

at the roof over the Quantico garrison. In that land

leathernecks fresh back from the Mekong River concocted

an argosy of combustible rockets, pissed enough to shoot

them high up the very bowels of Heaven itself, remembering

the rainbow infernos replete with deafening swirls. For

my sake he acted like the phantasmagoric lights were

something wrong with the steamy sferics of late June

clashing with the wintry remnants of April. He called

me a fortúnate son, perhaps, for

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