Lifetimes
Quentin Baker Copyright 2009
Smashwords Edition
Explorers
There once was a class of twelves
Whose words were elegant delves
Into futures and pasts
And splendors that last
Like love, music, and dreams,
Like rooms, faces, bodies, and screams
But more than all these,
Stop and think of this, please:
They were really exploring their selves.
Morning Child
Your bird-like cries break morning silence,
Your feet scurry loudly in the hall,
Messages to a new day
And to the world: I am!
1991
Journey
The bell signals down;
Relentless engines pause,
Their roar turns soft,
almost silent,
And the drift begins,
This steady, barely perceptible movement
(At night there are no markers yet).
Downwards into the past
To the hellos-hugs-kisses
And wrinkled graying into white of sisters
Of my other self, my home self, met with oh such merry eyes.
The past reclaimed for a weekend, never quite satisfying,
But always necessary.
The bell signals up,
The engines roar, grating.
Cabin voices dither blunt life and death messages, unlistened,
The upward push begins, almost imperceptible
(There are few markers even in the light).
The present into which I come insists,
Always,
In having its way.
The Grave
for my student, Charles Nurisso
“Dear Buddy
We love you.
Edie & James”
Handwritten note placed with a small American flag at the bottom of the Wall, nearest the 1959 corner.
“The memorial.....is dedicated to honor (those)whose answered their country’s call.”— National Park Service pamphlet
None of us, I think, have been told that it’s a grave,
Though Maya Ying Lin got it just right,
And we have been shown television and newspaper images of it for years,
And politicians of many stripes,
Some of them veterans and wearers of many hats,
Have droned on to us about its meaning.
Strange.
Yet there it is, plain as can be:
Come across the grass and through the trees of Constitution Gardens from the west:
Eight feet wide at the grass level,
One hundred fifty feet long on each side,
Set out like a carpenter’s square
That could easily be converted to a cross if another minor war would come.
Follow me down one slope
Where it sinks gradually to a perfect match to meet the slope from the other side:
We mirror ourselves in their shiny black granite names,
Descending in awe towards the inverted apex of mounting casualties
Embellished either by diamonds or crosses.
“Why isn’t there a monument to the Korean War, Mr. Baker?”
Joanne asked as only a fifteen year old can, clear-eyed, direct, innocent.
Other smaller kids, their private school blazers proclaiming 1873, were taking rubbings of the dead.
I could not answer, the teacher me lost.
Joanne gave up and rejoined the larger group.
Help me now thumb through this worn directory,
The years have passed and I cannot catch the letters of his name.
I know he’s here, an M, perhaps an N;
Look for San Francisco, a thoughtful way to arrange the details.
I see only his tall frame, large-shoulders, round face and already a close crew cut
A strong voice as I recall, mostly cheerful but always serious
Probably a B, perhaps an A.
Look, here are the Mack boys, brothers;
I knew them not,
One’s name sits below the other:
One was not enough.
Martinez.
More.
Shift your focus now,
Lincoln’s glorious, safer pantheon looms huge and white and Grecian off behind, the great man
brooding still on this America whose facts can gut our gung ho optimism.
Come back down with me again for one more look.
Our guide, a veteran volunteer who helps the National Park Service,
Points out,” If you stand here, you see the left side of the Lincoln above the ground and the right
side in the Wall, see?”
“Yes, thank you.”
My student remains lost in that myriad of names,
Forgotten all these years until that very morning.
Perhaps he will emerge again on Armistice Day
And surely on those days that parents mark their children’s birth.
So strong and proud and sure, he was,
His ROTC uniform crisp and sharp,
His small medals brazen,
Our Cadet Colonel, O’Connell School’s first,
Pampered and pumped by Sergeant Adams,
A man who should have known better,
Having been to the Nam himself,
But whose good soldiering betrayed him and all those young men who listened,
Not to lies
But to genuine ignorance,
An ignorance that has led our country more than once
Into an abyss paid in young men’s blood,
In vain indeed.
America the cosmic fool,
Seizing the Vietnamese opportunity to test all those sophisticated weapons and devices and
strategies
A partial list will do:
Agent Orange
Arclight
B52 Tactical Support
Walleye Rockets
Puff the Magic Dragon
Cluster Bombs
Attack Helicopters
See and Smell in the Dark Detectors
Napalm spread across the land in degrees more terrible than ever but never finding victory
Free Fire Zones
Search and Destroy
Pacification
A Secret Plan to End the War
And not once, in all those years, stopping really to ask why,
Or doubt that we could never fail.
Leviathan flailing at the Gnat,
Blinded by one terrible obsession,
Feeding more cadets and still more into the quagmire* into the grinder
And taking many hundred thousand black pajama men into this bitter hole as well.
Remember, Life depicted one week’s supply of haunting faces.
The Vietnamese boy’s round face and querulous eyes stare at us still in our television living rooms,
“his eyes wonderful and large, his face flawless in that flickering, unflattering glare of CBS
and Eastern sun.”**
But still the drills, the code names, the operation plans went forth,
Passed from one great leader to the next and always with solemn orchestrations of
being right and true.
The boy’s bigger, bellicose brothers, a few of them at least,
Saved in the mad rush of helicopters, boats, planes, and money, still break the peace
in these United streets.
Hindsight is a surer way to cast a net of blame,
But pause and think what good work those sergeants could have done
Had they but known the truth.
Let me say it once again:
In ignorance our most enlightened media
Portray the Wall heroically in countless pictures and in words,
And yet continue their refusal.
Never, never speak the one word
Most pertinent:
Grave.
The monument as a grave,
Not quite what we expected
(There are sufficient Arlingtons throughout these many States, their marching crosses
sweep across the grass, up and down the rolling slopes, monuments enough for most).
Getting off the Mall bus,
I saw the flags,
Saw the modest signs,
Looked left and right,
Noted the pitiful veterans’ tent pitched on the grass,
Took in the nearby pantheon and way off up there the obelisk, then the capital’s dome, the highest
D.C. point of all,
But I could not see the Wall.
“Where is it?” I asked, “Maybe I’ve come to the wrong garden.”
And then, following along behind the group,
My camera at the ready,
I came upon It,
Stumbling in a blinding light,
The anti-communist dream
Buried in a downward sloping hole,
Filled with “more than fifty-eight thousand names”,
Lovers, killers, brothers, sons, fathers, uncles, cousins, and yes, sisters and mothers too,
Lied to and lied to again,
Sometimes through ignorance perhaps,
The consequence of policy
Made by those who would not bear the brunt.
Lied to other times by rose-tinted thinking that could not bear to fail.
And finally, lied to through that peculiar calumny that strikes this republic,
But cannot be admitted (even East Germany apologized to Israel for crimes against the Jews).
Five presidents thought shallowly, spoke falsely, and did not have to pay.
Two of these were well-known liars and dissemblers,
One was caught beyond his ken, tough and honest but unquestioning,
The third, a Catholic like Diem, was himself cut down before the truth was grasped.
No reconciliation for these heroes,
No honor for these dead,
None will hear apology,
Torn apart, thrown carelessly away across twenty*** terrible years
Down
Into this shallow,
Fruitless
Grave.
March 1989
*David Halberstam’s The Making of a Quagmire: America and Vietnam during the Kennedy Era. “The misery of the people was (the Communist’s) ally, and they played on it. Where Americans often parroted slogans about improving the world of the Vietnamese peasant, the Vietcong, who had risen from this misery themselves, knew that lip service was not enough. To them the war was entirely political; its military aspects were simply a means to permit them to practice their political techniques. They made every grievance theirs: long-standing historical antagonisms, whether against Asians or Caucasians, became their grievances, as were economic inequities, the division of the land, the arbitrary system of tax collection—even the ravages of disease.
“As the Vietcong achieved military success through their political techniques, the Government and the Americans responded with increased weaponry and more troops. But this did not mitigate the grievances; indeed, the increased number of troops often meant more bombings, more deaths and more suffering.”
** “Just for a Second”, Michael Hogan, Letters to My Son, 1976
*** “Chronology”, Stanley Karnow, Vietnam, A History, 1983
Summer Morning
for Mark Twain
One more cold damp summer morning in San Francisco
That nobody does anything about.
The thick whiteness blows and drifts,
Blankets the hills, smothers the high rises,
Chokes the streets,
All the way to Gough.
St Mary’s tolls: “War-ning! War-ning! War-ning!”
Some think they hear a call to prayer,
But I believe it’s but a conversation
With the brother and sister horns,
Bellowing
Ocean lost,
Rocking along in their fog shrouded loneliness,
Their profound cries potent with terror.
Another cold, damp summer morning in San Francisco
That nobody does anything about.
Essence
For Tom Patchett, 1932-1988
The surge of your essence,
Springs up from our humanity,
Spreads straight across my wall:
Pen and ink scapes of strong, naked, sometimes fallen birches and sidehill mountain places,
From one who loved a rambling wooden fence that dips down
among wild grasses and bears witness for mankind and
A small pond where doubtless you stood so long some days, forgetting why you had come there,
just staring, staring, staring through summer heat at that quickness, until that
insistent hard-skinned hand shook and made you keep your promise:
a piece eventually for me and for
Everyman,
Given so joyously on a hill street in Butte when last we talked,
Contained nicely now within 8 x 10
Black frames,
Suspended by cruel wire on brass hangers nailed tight into the Navajo White wall.
I stare and stare and stare at them again, now,
As I did at first,
Rather amazed that one of us
(Guys who vomited cheap wine in a basement room,
Who socked it to those poor bastard farm boys in fields of autumn green,
Who laughed and milled and yelled halcyon halls,
Who had numerous complex thoughts and arguments, quite forgotten, about the meaning of this
existence,
Who dared it all to drive straight into a weaving tree to prove God,
Who proudly foolish boarded trains to Korea carrying one overnight bag, wearing summer’s
short-sleeved flowered shirt and jeans,and carrying Dashiel Hammet bought special for this
trip that definitely had outgrown Spiderman and Archie,
Who laughed disbelieving, but proudly out of all proportion, at learning of the other’s
first real lover, knowing at last that love would happen and that worry could be over,
Who arm wrestled in bars where bartenders set down an extra drink, pleased with the
napkin portrait of themselves,
Clinging really, each to each, but saying much the opposite),
Had this much to him,
Ennobling every one.
Haikus for Nolan*
Womb-free
Womb-free
Pushed, your cries break waiting silence
Startle the world
Lusty, womb-free.
Nolan Strikes Out
A thousand random moves
Push, wave, touch, stroke, hit
One day it works:
Learning
Hunger
Not crying, he wakes new day’s brilliance
Looks here, there, frets,
Panic
Belly pains
*Nolan Baker Johnson was our first grandchild, and I was fortunate to be able to take
care of him and my daughter Sarah in January and February 1990