30 Day Leave

30 Day Leave

That night we drank warm whiskey   

in our parked car

beyond woods now lost to the suburbs,   

I fell in love with you.  

                           Bruce Weigl  

                           Elegy for Peter

Once, smoke rose through the close-strung one hundred

to a rung herring posted on their own stake hung rafter high to steep

the dry heat and make the fair or unfair exchange 

(depending on yours and theirs childhood desires) 

complete. Months after you died your mother accidently burned

down the family herring shed you'd set back above the tide

before you left the first time and while she’s forgiven especially
even the loss of the entire dory load of the glossiest-

goddamn it-by- Jesus fish she’d ever been told

to stake, gill to mouth to gill to mouth and up to pine smoke

once they come from the brine soft as your soon blue cheek
only three weeks into your 30 day leave.  She sees their blood

and grease and scales stuck on your jeans and you seemingly
asleep beneath the steering wheel she bent beneath to see you

and past you and the end you came to after come twenty some

odd days of before ending being a three-year tour.  Home by

Christmas 1968, a changed man from your boots to the spooks

and lost gouls shimmying through entire two or entire three nights

lighting small fires in that shed and closing the wind in

on them and subduing them all like a mystic you’d read up

on some months before your complete break

and how you’d come to see yourself only ever leaving

the living and their villages and smelling instead of them
their every day lamps within them like dinner invitations,

surprised by the quiet Buddhists and their shy obliged

smiles while rice hoards were turned over by the stock

of your gun and into the sky and while some French Catholic
crucifixes and their last-to-collapse-brass (sifting through  

you wrote home once how you thumbed the verdigris
rib and abs and throat of the God you wanted to take

as your own hope or as that open invitation hospitable as smoke
the way your mother stoked the smoked bone you left off

tending that last night to go for that last drive a quick drive
and she pulled the stakes down onto her face and opened

every smoke-stoked bone and showed your ghost and the both
of you left off knowing the other so closely then and how

you knew each other now the way fish know water

after they’re removed from it and after it’s removed

from them and slowly and all them given up to foreign places
like rooftops  like dry land or rice and then throw everything

up, everything they and you and she were ever made
for and smile a practiced, ironic smile while doing it.