Where is Yakutat?

Where is Yakutat?

Tucked into the forelands, nestled between Sitka Spruce,

Raven and Eagle share with Glacier Bear and Black-tailed Deer.

Without fog, eighteen thousand vertical feet of relief is revealed

On the eve of sunrise, cast in pink, purple, and fiery red-orange

Begets the Coho in the last days of life upon the pebbles

Of the Sitak and the Ahrnklin Rivers, fighting currents.

I ask him What is there to do for fun in Yakutat? Drink, he

Casually admits, and I remember, that’s the same thing we do

For fun in every other hamlet called home, as we’re all left

Alone strumming the chords of our own panoramic hinterland.

Dendrometric Transect

Dendrometric Transect

9 point 2. 3 point 7. 6 point 9.

The graduated metallic tape

Calibrated to 3 point 1 4 is

Held with thumb and index finger,

Using both hands, slipped behind

The girth of her trunk measuring

Diameter at breast height—

As if you’re taking her bra off.

From her rings you know

She’s only 19, but through

The fog, with no fire, you leave

Her and reach for another.

Photo by Amanda Byrd, UAF ACEP, as seen on FaceBook.

Your Resources

Your Resources

Hemlock and Sitka Spruce stand

dozens of board feet upward,

pointing to the heavens,

pointing to raven and eagle,

where the clouds forget your name,

darkening Disenchantment Bay.

Published in O-Dark-Thirty:Summer Edition 2013

The Review is out, a seasonal literary journal from the Veterans Writing Project called O-Dark-Thirty.  I have a poem published in the summer edition.

Fear

Fun with borrowed forms, false documents.  I'm so glad Rob taught a class on a what he calls False Documents.  Valerie Laken gave a very similar craft talk at the residency, calling it On Borrowed Forms.  A simple definition would be presenting prose, or poetry, through some guise or rhetorical faux mode.  I feel the visual presentation is as much a part of the ruse as the content, so there is an image version below.  Note: this poem is still in a some stage of revision.  

New American Dictionary

(Definition of Fear)

fear |ff`ear  |

noun

1. a sense of emotion arising from the nape of one you attempt to intimidate. 2. an unpleasant emotion caused by the belief that someone or something is dangerous. 3. likely to cause pain. 3. a bitter smell usually tasted at the back of the throat in the form of dryness. 4. George Bush Junior’s missile defense network. 5. the absence of something you possessed the night before. 6. usually evoked instantaneously by an outside agent. 7. Dick Chaney on a quail hunting excursion. 7. the nightly news. 8. waking up older than the day before. 9. the IRS. 10.  when the lights go out

Fredericksburg Haibun

This poem was inspired by a poem by Robert Hass, On Visiting The DMZ at Panmunjom: Haibun.  His poem reminded me what its like to visit, and grow up on and around battlefields.  The quantity of lives lost is a rich reminder at the start of his prose.  I  like how the haiku is a shift from man's destruction to the harmony of nature.  

Fredericksburg Haibun

Union Yank encampments were north of the Rappahannock, a brown murky river flowing west to east.  The town sits on the fall line: the tidewater to the right, the piedmont to the left. A dot upon the map General’s Lee and Burnside poured upon hourly, yet separated from one another not only by the river but the color of their uniform.  Confederate Reb cannon’s and trench’s were dug into Marye’s Heights, granting over-watch of the once beautiful city, now occupied by snipers hiding within dilapidated churches firing from steeples on an enemy, once countrymen, struggling to construct pontoon bridges in the cold month of December.  Upon finally gaining a foothold in the city, brief urban combat ensued in the streets but the majority of gray dressed forces settled in behind a stonewall and from positions on the heights south west of the city.  Fourteen times men dressed in blue charged the stonewall and fourteen times they were repelled.  Thirteen of those times men charged over the bodies of their comrades at the stone wall, most falling themselves, building what must have looked like a wall of corpses.

Bones and bullets buried

beneath shopping malls, soil no

longer stained with blood.

"... here is where the world ends, every time."

If you're not familiar with Brian Turner, you should be.  Turner, in my opinion, captures the essence of the many emotions a Soldier feels in combat.  I've read quite a bit of literature stemming from armed conflict over the last couple hundred years, my hope is we'll be reading Turner's poems in school fifty years from now when we talk about the nearly decade long war in Iraq.

"... here is where the world ends, every time." is the last line of his poem, "Here, Bullet."

This is an hour long interview.  I think the interviewer is annoying, but Turner's responses are candid and spot-on.  He talks a lot about identity.  Meaning, what it was like being a poet, and, Soldier.  I loved his response to a question about Brian the poet and Sgt. Turner the squad leader.  He also talks about how the war improved his writing- what do you think?