Letter Home:

Letter Home:

WWII: Somewhere

in the Pacific Ocean                       

It’s different, it is,to see it snow at sea: the soft

(or sometimes not) long drift (or sometimes not)

of flake and flake and flake, and the way

it accumulates on the deck, the way it’s absolutely

swallowed by the salt-rimmed lips of each low

then high slope wave: wholly gone.  There.  And then. 

How, now, seeing the white pocked sky and the inch high

almost ash on the coats of the crew, they in black boiled wool

coats rising and disappearing in the wind and snow

in their slow clearing of the deck so that they’re in

and out of the frame: visible                                        absent

visible              absent                          visible

they seem a lighthouse beam, whose straight out from shore

is an eye cutting the snow, a closure opening, close, open, a code

of what shore you’re about to run aground against…but oh

if my brother could be here he loved snow he just dug and hunkered

and tunneled and flung it into…just for this part.  Not the war.

No.  Not the war.

And the ship pitches and shifts and the snow, what drifts...it’s my

turn at the deck.  It's odd, the white that falls into the drink, is gone

all gone, as gone as all the boys that day eight boys.

But how spooky when the eye ,when the sky when it all everything (after

they died) was snow-falling calm.