Skip to main content

Blood Poisoning v3

 

Blood Poisoning



JFK and Jackie are in the news,

game show hosts and soaps, 

but without the Maytags and Mercuries,

their profiles of luck, success and beauty 

beyond what boys could achieve

or girls imagine.


We catch a scent of distant threat

and hunker under desks 

and hear about oriental dominoes 

and missiles south of Miami.  


Every May a repurposed army truck

rumbles down South Street 

with a monster fan mounted on its cab

waving back and forth, 

blowing storms of DDT into elm trees

in a failing war against the gypsy moth. 


We run alongside and it was an early Fourth of July, 

especially when we heard the sonic booms 

of F4 Phantom jets streaking toward a MIG-free coast.  


I still see planes crashing in my dreams.


The dads, the uncles, the village cop,

the Boy Scouts’ Sergeant Major,  

the Peyton Place-exile guidance counselor 

the pastor and the priest

all have much to say.  

 

We are only certain 

that guts are required  

for the expected charge at dominance. 

In season - soccer, deer, basketball,

the sweat, the musk and the aggression, 

the blood, the bruises and the exhaustion 

damp it for a time.


But in summer two boys face off side by side 

elbows cocked, forearms aligned left by right, 

while a friend sucks on a Camel or a Kool 

then drops it in the valley between their arms, 

and the stink of burning hair rises 

and the red coal sinks through ash 

and flesh until the loser yanks away 

to the laughter of the small town boys,

one who will soon be burning in Vietnam  

and another, returning with 

fake ID and Genesee from The Manor,

will sail through his windshield 

taking with him

the blinded bravado of youth.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milo Fine and Anthony Cox August 30, 2025. An Appreciation with Digressions.

Studio Toile d’Angles was carved out of a near north Minneapolis lot and erected next door to the home of Milo Fine, Minnesota’s least compromised multi-instrumentalist, composer and instigator of modern music.  Rectangular and sunk in the land, it is maybe 18 x 30 feet; the roof points to high north and descends covered with solar panels toward the south and inside meets a wall ten feet above the floor. A kitchenette and bathroom are in a back corner. No street shoes permitted.  Twenty or so moveable padded chairs, a couch and cushions are set in loose rows seven feet from Cox and his cello. The front row audience is six feet from the end of Fine’s black lacquer Bosendorpher Imperial piano. It is nine feet six inches long and includes nine notes lower than a concert grand’s 88. Debussy, Bartok and Ravel were early adopters. Capable, I am sure, of near-Richter scale waves, Fine’s often emphatic playing still left space for Cox’s bowed, plucked, tapped, and picked cello.  ...
Post a Comment
Read more

You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma.

  You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma. “ We have art so that we do not perish because of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Or, we have art so we can turn sometimes awful truths into new and even joyful life, a dialectic we can enact in  our own experiences.   This is my new understanding of how I have dealt with big trauma by turning to art. I address the personal loss  and tragedy in my wife Karen’s stroke and her survival and how writing, my artistic outlet, gave me surprising joy.   And looking back on my brother David’s even more tragic mental illness, art is there too.  I found things that we  can take from these experiences individually and as a community.  And in the process of looking at all this I’ve  found others who have turned trauma and tragedy into unexpected joy.  Lost and Found Connections In early 2001 Karen was working at Northwest Airlines and we took advan...
Post a Comment
Read more

Refugees All

Among my forebears are the Schwenkfelders, reformation-era sectarians who emigrated from Silesia (now part of southwestern Poland) to Pennsylvania in 1700s, with stops in several German states and the Netherlands. These were followers of Caspar Schwenkfeld, who in the early 1500s had earned the enmity of Martin Luther because of doctrinal disputes.  They were despised by both Catholics and Lutherans.  The main issues in contention were whether infants should be baptized ("no" said my folks) and whether bread and wine were really Jesus's flesh and blood in communion ("no" said  my folks).  They thought that individuals' direct and unmediated pursuit of salvation through faith in Jesus and God was the way.     As minor states in the region became increasingly sectarian and rulers came and went, the pacifist Schwenkfelders, who also believed in strict separation of church and state, became targets. Their books were burned. Those who hid the books were...
Post a Comment
Read more