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BATHING BEAUTIES (POEM)

                         Dean Metcalf ©1985, 2012

Del Mar Beach,

California 1985

I.

Slipping sideways under Cinzano umbrellas,

afternoon sun hammers ice

through thin walls of tonic glasses,

extruding beads of limesweat.

Greased bodies sizzle,

layed out along the griddle

that is the continent’s edge:

so much sexual bacon.

In the outdoor shower,

bikinied teens preen,

already posing for Playboy.

At the steps to the beach,

where everyone can see,

a couple stand

so everyone can see.

He is tall, blond,

tan, seventeen.

His muscles are from play,

for playing with:

not from work,

not for working with.

She is shorter, blonde,

nubile, fourteen.

She wears four small triangles

     of blue cloth.

She wears her self-assurance

as if she had already done everything

the older men under the Cinzano umbrellas

     are wishing they could do with her

and found it amusing.

She tosses her hair,

turning to devour

the stares

that are devouring her.

                   

II.

She is eighty.

She walks with a cane.

She has trouble with the sand.

At the other end of her life,

the soft girl’s bones of her feet were

broken, toes bent back under the arch

to form the desired opening

for a highborn man’s erection, then bound

to heal, if that is the right word, into

a different kind of foot.

They are still bound,

her childhood trapped there

like butterflies pressed

in a book.

You can see

she loves the sun.

She walks carefully

past the perfect couple

past the sizzling Californians

lifting her withered face

pushing the cane with withered hands

down to where the salt foam

washes her shortened feet,

down to where one wave’s foam

smoothes the sand with its coming,

withers the same sand with its leaving,

the withered sand a mirror to her skin.

She lifts her face

smiles into the sun

smiles toward the West,

toward China.

                                   Dean Metcalf ©1985,2012

"WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE"

With God on Our Side

Sometimes I think this little story comes across as funny. In fact it even does to me, at times. But remember: it takes place in 1963, before many of us even learned to spell "Vietnam." In fact, properly written, it's two words: "Viet Nam." But looked at from a certain slant, it tells a lot about how armies are made. It describes us when we were "young and dumb...."

     Steve McLaughlin and I had been buddies at 29 Palms, had both gone through radio telegraph school at San Diego, and both ended up on Okinawa in 1964. My new outfit was the Twelfth Marines, an artillery regiment headquartered at the US Army's Camp Sukiran. Steve was in another outfit on Sukiran.

     One day I ran into Steve at the camp library. "C'mere," he said, and led me into the listening room where you could play records from the library's collection. He showed me an album cover; I looked at it while he put the record on and set the needle down on the song he wanted me to hear. The album was by this beautiful young folk singer with long, flowing black hair. Her name was Joan Baez. I'd never heard of her.

     The song Steve wanted me to hear was "With God on Our Side." It was by some guy named Bob Dylan. Never heard of him either. Steve wasn’t sure what the words of the song were getting at, and wanted to know what I thought. We played it, talked about it, played it some more. We were trying to figure out what it meant. It was clearly a song about war, about what an important thing war is, about how important it is to get it right if you do it. It seemed, on the one hand, a very reverent song. "...but you don't ask questions/when God's on your side." That made sense to us. It went perfectly well with how we'd been brought up, and with how the Marine Corps had trained us: Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to do or die....

     But was there something else? The question nagged at us as we played the song again and again. The singer and the words were so sincere that we tended to take the song at face value. She was clearly pointing out that in wars, both sides often claim to have God on their side. What that seemed to us to mean was that one side had to be wrong, since God wouldn't be on both sides at once. So it must be a song about how important it was to be on the right side. That would be us, of course. 

But would it? Could she actually be saying that both sides might be wrong? Wow. We didn't think so, but maybe. We left the library without coming to a conclusion that satisfied either of us about what the song intended. What we did agree on was that we'd sure like to meet that babe on the album cover.    

ICICLES (POEM)

1/4/02 Chief Joseph Mountain

For three days, snow has fallen

onto the cabin roof, thawed, slid,

frozen, slid again, curved, re-

frozen until a foot-thick whitecap

of corrugated ice

hangs above my door, a row

of two-foot icicles

along its lower edge. As

the ice became a half-circle

the icicles turned and pointed at the wall:

the very claws of winter.

It thawed again, and the icicles thinned

at one point only, near their tops, and

they drooped, then bent

until they pointed long slender

lumpy-knuckled fingers
at the ground.

Comes the light. Blue moon glows through

gauzy clouds; white stars blink

between.

I step off the porch,

look up, watch

as light enters ice.

Blue light enters ice, turns,

pings around inside

until icicles begin

to vibrate, then hum.

Light becomes music, and

the row of crazy icicles

are skinny silver temple bells tolling

the hymn of winter.                                   

                                                               © Dean Metcalf 2002, 2012