30 Day Leave

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.