Morning

For now, we will forgive the nightmares (so-called) because there is nothing should distract us from our happiness.  As children, we are obligated to be happy.  Those inconvenient moments of confusion, anxiety, terror are easily glossed over, easily treated with the rosy sheen of sentiment.

While babies smile and toddlers squirm, they worm their way into our heads, our hearts, into our dreams.  My father will recount to us the emerging personalities of each of his five children.  His youthful speculations of who we were, of what we would become slowly evolved into a stolid confidence.  Infants are amphibians; between two worlds, they crawl out of the mire, the muck, the mother...  The eyes are slits.  They slowly open.  These five nascent senses--so powerful, so persuasive in experience--are finding the way onto the land.

Thus,  overwhelmed by light and noise, the body begins to breathe, begins to be in the world.

I taste the salt of my own tiny fist.  I feel the soft cotton against my cheek and smell the extravagance of the fabric softener that my mother has justified by my arrival.  I am a speechless voyeur.  My own eyes, defocused and straining in the grey evening light, stare abstractly at some shadows in the corner of the room.  

A creaking door and light invades the somber silence of my cell.  Then there appears above me a crescent moon of smiling faces.  Back-lit and nodding, they are a bouquet of flowers above me.  I smile.  They are stars.  They are flowers floating in the firmament: they are love, attention, security, in full bloom.  

Nam

I have not met my Vietnamese cousins.   Not one of them.  I think there are four.  I think that because of some vague memory I have of their names (grotesque hybrids of Vietenglish) scribbled on pieces of paper to be thrown into the ceramic blue pitcher so that my mother and here mother can draw names for the Christmas gift exchange.  An awkward formality for the sprawling ten tribes of Gustafson, this ritual was performed in mid-summer infusing some hot July afternoon with a premature anticipation of the holidays.  I remember a visit from the youngest of those ten siblings (the eleventh was dead by then)  upon his return from Nam.  This was the first intersection of real life and the news  that I experienced, the soldier in our living room opening a trunk of exotic presents from an exotic land.  In the years to come, these objects sat with permanence on dusty shelves while the war and my idea of the war evolved and adapted to reflect both my hopes and my convictions.  Nam.  Beyond the defeat--the drama of the helicopters hovering above the embassy, the legacy of lost men, bearded and hollow-eyed on street corners begging for the impossibility of peace, the glut of ugly films about the conflict that crowded my youth--there would be something....  A man-crush of mine has gone to Viet Nam.  To say it sounds creepy to me.  Still the lacquered anxiety of another generation's experience informs the way that phrase sounds.  I do not imagine a rickshaw ride through a bustling capital or the luxuriant rest on a hammock on a tropical beach. I see his bare flesh cut open and Hollywood having its way with the tragedy.  How little drama there is in the peace on the other side.

Stanzas for Gramma

Working in the flowers
in the bright Dakota sun,
she would wile away the hours
waiting forward kingdom come.

In every nook and cranny,
she had little aches and pains:
a wiry kind of granny
armed with ear aid and a cane.

But she was a merry widow,
her abuser long since dead.
She confided to me, "Kiddo,
love is never made of dread."

She showed me yellowed pictures
from fifty years into the past;
I was my granddad without whiskers,
a genetic shadow he had cast.

So Gramma watched for signs of temper
and a tendency to dream,
looking for a chance to censure
her grandson for who he "seems"

I stayed in my grandma's cellar
when i was working on the farm,
fantasizing about fellers
while the snakes did me no harm.

Comes morning she would call me
for hot oat meal in July
then her criticism stalled me
as she looked me in the eye.

Her tongue was barbed but subtle
inferring I was less a man;
left no room for a rebuttal
and no place for me to stand.

So I escaped her breakfast table,
joined my cousins on my horse.
I was hardly feeling stable:
craving love/receiving force.

A year of fearless living
and news came she had died
We saddled up the horses,
rode through twilight while we cried.