30 Day Leave
Smoke rose through the
close strung one hundred
posted on the pole
stacked high enough to open
to the dry light and make
the fair or unfair exchange
(it depends on your
childhood desires) complete.
Days after you died your
mother accidently burned
down the herring shed set
back above the tide
and she’s forgiven even
the loss of the entire dory
load of the glossiest by
Jesus fish she’d ever been told
to stake, mouth to gill,
to smoke after they come
from the brine soft as
your cheek three weeks
into your last
leave. See the blood and grease and you
seemingly asleep beneath
the wheel she made her way
past and that end you
came to after come twenty some
odd days of being a
three-year PFC. Home by
Christmas 1968, a changed
from the shoes to the cheeks
lost soul going through
entire two or three entire nights
lighting fires in that
shed and closing the wind in
on them and subduing it
all like a mystic you’d read
on some months before
your complete conversion
and how you’d come to see
yourself only ever
leaving the living
villages and smelling instead the every
day lamps within them
like dinner invitations
surprised by the quiet Buddhists
and their shy obliged
smiles while rice hoards
were turned over
into the sky while some
French Catholic crucifixes
and their last to
collapse brass (sifting through once
you thumbed the verdigris
rib and abs and throat
of the God you wanted to take
your hope as that open
invitation hospitable as
smoke the way your mother
stoked the smoked bone
you left off tending one night
to go for a drive a quick
drive and she pulled the stakes
onto her face and opened
every smoke stoked bone
and showed your ghost and
the both of you told
of knowing the other now
the way fish know water
after they’re removed
from it and after it’s removed
to foreign places like
rooftops on dry land and give up
everything they were ever
made for and smile
a practiced, ironic smile
while doing it.
