Day Trip
For it was, yes it was, it was a wonderful time to be young, an era of as-yet unfulfilled expectations of newness and discovery and that one special relationship you would find, the person who would certainly give you that sense of completion which you were sure would make you whole. Daffodils, lilacs, dandelions and warm green grass needing a trim, each blade happy to reach for the sun. The sun danced in her hair, refracting on each strand, each strand spun by Rumplestiltskin into the finest gold . . . and her warm hand slipped into yours like there was no tomorrow, would never be a world of consequences, no day after, just always the same, happiness, warm sun, the fullness of life without having to pay for the trip.
The trip would reveal all, reveal how hollow and shallow such daydreams would be, would reveal all, reveal how thin the tissue was between reality and un, the two moons dancing and the walls crawling, the nearness of those other dimensions. Were you multi-dimensional too? Was that why you saw colors nobody else could?
And once that errant train had returned to the station, the same station but forever afterward a different station, having gone godknowswhere, the sunlight washed the landscape like an antiseptic, scrubbed the impurities of the previous day from the canvas, the ever-altered nature of your interior never to perceive the three natures of reality as a single flat image again, things would always be not so much better or worse, but fuller, deeper, richer and more mystifying.
Independence Days
I wouldn’t say the Fourth of July fills me with melancholy. It just brings up memories, but not those of happy boyhood summers filled with cookouts and sparklers – instead I am reminded of too much else.
As we sit there in the park after sunset, my wife and me, our daughter and son-in-law and four grandchildren, I am filled with a kind of aversion and dread.
Used to be, after the war, or my involvement with it, when I was still single, that I’d spend each Fourth in a darkened movie theater watching some action thriller – good guy, bad guy – you get the idea. Nothing like the real experience of combat.
The fa-foomp of the heavy bore fireworks launchers and the WHAM! of the high-explosive, concussive shocks that followed still trigger an unpleasant instinct to burrow face first into the soft earth and shoot anything in front of me that moves.
Funny, but the night infiltration course at Dix, during Basic, was much the same sort of thing, but in a controlled environment, so you could only imagine what a night-time fire-fight was like, and your brain always knew at a certain level that it wasn’t the real thing. Besides which, the infiltration course had more to do with preparing the allies for Normandy than it did the men of Delta Company for the rice paddies and mud-and-wattle villages of the middle Mekong.
They hit us when we were a day-and-a-half out from our temporary forward base camp – they were coming down the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos from the west then, before they’d gotten fully dug in their tunnels – the indiscriminate nature of an automatic weapons firefight – the sudden deafening roar of grenades going off in your vicinity and the shockingly slow awareness as you scratch for safety of your comrades’ disintegrated abdomens or ragged double amputations and their bloody, bloody, terrified – and terrifying – senseless deaths, changes you. You get their weapons as your fifty cal melts its barrel – you’ve actually cut down trees with it you note idly – and insanely – and start unloading clip after clip of tumbling, copper-jacketed rounds from their M-16s – and the whine and crash of mortar fire from your rear crashing in red bloody fury into the forest ahead where your unseen enemy lies unleashing devastating and accurate fire on your platoon – then just as suddenly it is over and you bind up the wounds of the living as best you can and carry the wounded and dead backwards to the pick-up point that has been hastily arranged because you know the friendly Hueys will be chopping the air overhead in a few short minutes and laying down a covering groundfire where you are now to prevent any pursuit – and the questions of why you survived are as unanswerable as ever – return to the compound, make your report – you are now ranking, and, by default, squad leader – and, over the next six months, repeat the exercise again and again – so when those fireworks go off I do not enjoy it, cannot celebrate my independence from anything, especially the past.
Jamie Brown’s poetry has appeared in nearly three dozen different literary magazines, notably Beltway Poetry Quarterly, California Quarterly, Gargoyle, Ginosko Literary Journal, Howling Dog, Innisfree, Maintenant, Negative Capability, Phase & Cycle, San Fernando Poetry Journal. He won both a Best Book of Verse and a Best Chapbook of Verse by the Delaware Press Association for Sakura: A Cycle of Haiku, and The Delaware Bay: Poems respectively. He manages The Broadkill River Press.