By D.R. James
A bad eye and flat feet like mine
always kept him home. He’d try
again, but the war in Europe,
the war in North Africa, the war
in the Pacific didn’t want him.
For fifty years I knew that eye,
its milky look of no surprise,
his stiff-legged gait, but never
such longing, such capacity for
passion beyond company quotas—
until between their deaths my mother
told her stories: all the other boys
leaving for the service, the rationing
of coffee, sugar, meat, and gasoline,
the bond-raising big bands in Cleveland’s
glitzy ballrooms, the occasional V-mail
from her brother bivouacked in Belgium,
the telegram that said he was dead.
Then just a modest wedding—It was
wartime, you know—a few days off
from the aircraft factory for the brief
honeymoon at Niagara, and back to
eighty-hour work weeks, overnight trains
to the plant in St. Louis, the beginning
of my father’s industrious silence.