After That, This
Blackbird and woodpecker in the oaks over the road
and deer, sudden on the Farm to Market. All night
before he left for the war, the Persiads flew down
at the edges of our eyes. Before he started home,
he phoned from the base. Spinning toward our house
through a mist of summer insects, butterflies lifted
easily onto his windshield. He believed he was swimming
through our rooms. His eyes seined his surroundings.
He lifted his fists and I longed to shout —
watch out for the undertow, the drowning tide.
In the days after cherry blossoms, when the air lies
on J street, thick as elementary school paste,
a Dodge Dynasty creeps past our apartment,
on its torn bumper sticker: Make Love ...
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Dust
I couldn't remember last year
because I was in it. You didn't call it war.
You called it me being a bitch
but you knew too much about a range
of lesser cruelties to step aside or break
the harsh stillness, useful in the jungle.
Silence clicked into place like a Lego brick,
through the long afternoons we were building.
We lay down. You rose up in
your beautiful, whole skin. Your arm-hair
curled red-gold, a trick of light.
Your always-cold feet kept the memory
of swamp. You never mourned or cursed.
Still, I imagined the future as dust.
The future was.
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published by Aquila Review 2016
Salvage
A barehanded man contends with the sky. In the jungle behind
his eyes everything is green. Somewhere else, a jungle
cracks and separates. The words lonesome and trail remind him
of the Riders of the Purple Sage — the band, not the story.
When in the city, his metal parts consider their source. On the day
after Memorial Day, flags are gone from the next-door cemetery.
It's rules, management says, we're just following rules. The man
Washes underwear. He washes socks. He believes in
gustatory joy. Bacon fries. He believes in loss as dirty dishes
he will tend to soon. As Joni Mitchell implies in her early CDs,
love and ego can be conflated. He sometimes agrees.
Two trains and a bus collide in London. Even in Texas, trees
shed their leaves. In another latitude, soldiers who were his friends go
on vanishing. He believes they still nurse their decaying morals,
still raise what’s left of their eyebrows, still stay restless and bold.
He believes in salvage. He suspects they could move on if they
understood god as the mystery of the possible, if they let go of memory,
if they noticed as he did, the sameness in the present and history.
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published by VietnamWarPoetry.com
When He
When he described what they did to the old man, to the children
When he confessed his part, how like delirium it was
When he explained while it was happening, the half-forgotten voice
of sister Claire stood guard at his left shoulder and his arm
rose and fell and rose of its own accord
When he reported how it rained for weeks and his wet feet stayed wet and fungus
got one toe and how his body felt the same but never was the same again
and how for decades after that he loved the spoon.
When he related all of that that while looking at the spider web behind my head,
it was years later, miles away from that war and I don’t remember
what I whispered, in which soft vernacular, what lexicon of absolution
I picked to comfort him, nor later what common words
I used to hide from what I pictured then.
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published by Forage Poetry Journal 2016
Blackbird and woodpecker in the oaks over the road
and deer, sudden on the Farm to Market. All night
before he left for the war, the Persiads flew down
at the edges of our eyes. Before he started home,
he phoned from the base. Spinning toward our house
through a mist of summer insects, butterflies lifted
easily onto his windshield. He believed he was swimming
through our rooms. His eyes seined his surroundings.
He lifted his fists and I longed to shout —
watch out for the undertow, the drowning tide.
In the days after cherry blossoms, when the air lies
on J street, thick as elementary school paste,
a Dodge Dynasty creeps past our apartment,
on its torn bumper sticker: Make Love ...
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published in VietnamWarPoetry.com
Dust
I couldn't remember last year
because I was in it. You didn't call it war.
You called it me being a bitch
but you knew too much about a range
of lesser cruelties to step aside or break
the harsh stillness, useful in the jungle.
Silence clicked into place like a Lego brick,
through the long afternoons we were building.
We lay down. You rose up in
your beautiful, whole skin. Your arm-hair
curled red-gold, a trick of light.
Your always-cold feet kept the memory
of swamp. You never mourned or cursed.
Still, I imagined the future as dust.
The future was.
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published by Aquila Review 2016
Salvage
A barehanded man contends with the sky. In the jungle behind
his eyes everything is green. Somewhere else, a jungle
cracks and separates. The words lonesome and trail remind him
of the Riders of the Purple Sage — the band, not the story.
When in the city, his metal parts consider their source. On the day
after Memorial Day, flags are gone from the next-door cemetery.
It's rules, management says, we're just following rules. The man
Washes underwear. He washes socks. He believes in
gustatory joy. Bacon fries. He believes in loss as dirty dishes
he will tend to soon. As Joni Mitchell implies in her early CDs,
love and ego can be conflated. He sometimes agrees.
Two trains and a bus collide in London. Even in Texas, trees
shed their leaves. In another latitude, soldiers who were his friends go
on vanishing. He believes they still nurse their decaying morals,
still raise what’s left of their eyebrows, still stay restless and bold.
He believes in salvage. He suspects they could move on if they
understood god as the mystery of the possible, if they let go of memory,
if they noticed as he did, the sameness in the present and history.
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published by VietnamWarPoetry.com
When He
When he described what they did to the old man, to the children
When he confessed his part, how like delirium it was
When he explained while it was happening, the half-forgotten voice
of sister Claire stood guard at his left shoulder and his arm
rose and fell and rose of its own accord
When he reported how it rained for weeks and his wet feet stayed wet and fungus
got one toe and how his body felt the same but never was the same again
and how for decades after that he loved the spoon.
When he related all of that that while looking at the spider web behind my head,
it was years later, miles away from that war and I don’t remember
what I whispered, in which soft vernacular, what lexicon of absolution
I picked to comfort him, nor later what common words
I used to hide from what I pictured then.
by Contributing Poet Wendy Taylor Carlisle Copyright © 2016
VWP 2016 First published by Forage Poetry Journal 2016
Bio: Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of two books:
Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Books 2000) & Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Books 2008)
and three chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook is Persephone on the Metro (MadHat Press 2014).
Long ago, she was the wife of a Viet Nam veteran.
These poems reflect, but do not detail, her experience of a marriage in the aftermath of that war.
Reading Berryman to the Dog (Jacaranda Books 2000) & Discount Fireworks (Jacaranda Books 2008)
and three chapbooks. Her most recent chapbook is Persephone on the Metro (MadHat Press 2014).
Long ago, she was the wife of a Viet Nam veteran.
These poems reflect, but do not detail, her experience of a marriage in the aftermath of that war.
Except where otherwise attributed, all pages & content herein
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