Stand Down

I’m tearing up lettuce  cutting up cucumbers  tomatoes
not thinking about the upcoming week’s problems
turn the TV volume down on  some sports event till  60 minutes
begins: its news story  Stand Down  shoots the volume  up
 
out of my control into another tense
a truce between the past and present is broken
 
I watch vets crowd around tents  asking for help: treatment  jobs
and it’s 1993 again...we are at the first stand down
a vet salutes him and he salutes back  salutes a future intuited
 
I do not travel beyond that day  an outsider
I am taking it all in happy just to be together
 
the news commentator focuses on some homeless vets
he was never homeless  not physically  but was
mentally  he told me years later  trying to make me understand
what it’s like to become voiceless:
“can hear the tune   can  t sing”*
 
I couldn’t stop    and he didn’t want me to
but there it was   impassible
 
stand down: at ease  a temporary ceasefire
a Walt Disney survival fantasy:
word like a rock someone on a cliff throws off
hitting a person in a passing car
 
sniper word no one is ever prepared for...not I
not then  not now  not
that  Sunday  October 10th  2009
 
 From “ the boys in the band” by Andrew Gettler

It’s Because

long before someone filled the word with explosives
and sound reached vocabulary
to echo out of voices across America
I heard it in a mother’s because I said so
seen it  a boss’s eyes, a doctor’s set expression
when I asked, are you sure it’s necessary
picked it up in the unspoken way things are done
in my mother’s nursing home
when someone who changed tables at lunch was
ordered back, as if she’d illegally crossed a border
that line that divides order from anarchy
line carved in stone....what stone  has anyone ever seen it?
when a seven year old  in a Sharon Olds’ poem
says to another boy his age,
“we could easily kill a two-year old” at a birthday party
I heard it in an ex president’s  because I can  
                                                why
settled in one word laundered thru our lives
why to stop black markets from financing it
companies tightened restriction on
cigarette marketing in underdeveloped countries
why the PO refused my check without an address
why I must give my ss number to use a xerox machine
the college bought for that purpose, why
I asked a professor and got the same response as
from the clerk at the PO, from the druggiest
who needed to see ID to purchase cold meds
from the bank who said my ID was insufficient
to cash a $25.00 out of state check
 
and though I didn’t hear it after the Dec. 26th blizzard
as streets went unplowed, people left stranded
at airports, in stalled trains, cars and in ems trucks
waiting to be rescued, why a sanitation truck was 
parked outside a pizza store, I am still waiting
to hear the mayor  explain why weather reports
went ignored, what caused the distraction
                                                 say

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