WAR WORK WAGE
by Bill Tremblay
1
I kneel on the floor between library stacks
rummaging through books.
The cover of one features a man
with a beard like Gabby Hayes.
I open to a page laid out in lines
on which a spider casts filaments,
hoping to connect to something in the world.
But it’s not a spider,
he’s using the spider to mean his soul.
I feel my shoulder muscles open.
I too cast filaments building a web
to hold my loneliness.
2
Sometimes the world reaches in to me.
Some nights I hear Dizzy’s brother crying
“Help me!” German bullets clank-flash
on x-girders in surf
as he tries to rip himself free of barbed-wire.
When he reaches Omaha Beach
a tracer shears off the part of him
that could have made his own children.
I hear his mother hush him
with the lullaby of his Purple Heart.
I fling my filaments into the nightmares
soldiers come home with.
War is our daily bread.
We choke it down without water,
We cough out words, “kamikaze,” “blitzkrieg.”
Dizzy, Stashu and I put our fingers
under our noses for moustaches, goose-step
in a Heil Hitler salute up Wardwell Court.
A photograph fixes us—soldier, sailor, flyboy—
frescoed fissures on a ruined wall.
3
The Colonel reaches toward his men,
bleeding from a Messerschmitt.
They’re sucked out the fuselage into a flak-filled sky.
I launch my filaments to those I cannot save.
The gunners fall into French pastures.
The impact digs their graves.
No one dreams another war will come.
My sister’s husband wears
the big helmet on the carrier conning tower.
He says “Now hear this” as jets zoom off the deck.
Factories hiring again, more overtime, more sorrow
as mothers tear open telegrams.
Stashu’s cousin torn apart by a Russian MIG.
War is to prosperity as cause is to effect.
A new car can make up for any
number of nightmares.
My father says, “Nobody wants war,
but what’s a working stiff to do?”
What I want is hidden in tall leaves of grass.
I’ll be proud if I can guess their meaning.
The bearded poet is not just
making points of contact,
he’s making a pattern, a net, with a purpose.