TELL THE MEN (POEM)

                                                  Tell the Men              

                                                                 

                                                                   ©2012 Dean Metcalf

I.   I am the dream commander.

All around me

along the smoky runway

men fall, strafed

spinning

                bloody

                        down.

I scream, but

they will not believe:

our own

     top‑secret

     quiet‑rotor

     radar‑guided

     night‑vision

     heat‑seeking

     dream‑metal dragonflies

have returned

to kill us.

II.  "But they're ours!" men scream

as they stand, are hit, and fall

     spinningbloodydown.

Running, my body floats above the runway

among thumb‑size neon‑red tracers

borne upon their own wind: puffs of it

pass between my ribs.

III. In this dream, only I know:

words

are weapons.

All around me, men see,

trying not to see.

Men fail to aim their words

at the real enemy.

Men drop their books

or read absently

standing in the open

as if life were not dangerous.

IV.  Sergeant!

Work your way along the line.

Tell the men:

Fill sandbags with words.

Build a parapet to fight behind.

If they are the right words

you live.

Tell every man:

Dip each fifth word

in your own blood,

so your shots will glow red:

tracers to find your targets

in the dark.

Tell every man to sharpen one word.

Say, You must choose:

"yes" or "no."

Snap it onto your rifle,

for when this gets down to bayonets.

Tell all the men:

It's not the men of darker skin

who broadcast our blood upon the land

as a poor shopkeeper tosses water

from a red plastic pail

to settle dust on an unpaved street.

Tell the men:

We toss our own blood in the dust

where crimson arterial spurts of it

roll into powdery skins

like water in flour

no longer recognizable as blood

it could be any dark liquid:

it could be used crankcase oil.

Tell them:

We live and die

     by what we think

     by what we write

     by what we say

     by what we do.

Tell the men:

     Get your words.

     Get in the trenches.

Here they come.

                                                               Dean Metcalf

                                                               P.O. Box 548

                                                               Joseph OR 97846

                                                             3dmetcalf@gmail.com

This poem was first published several years ago in the online journal RIVEN, edited by Michael Spring. Tell the Men© 2012 Dean Metcalf

DREAM: RATTLESNAKE AND PISTOL

Dream: Rattlesnake and Pistol

People come running up to me: people I know, friends, family, the human community. They're all afraid. They scurry and bump into one another in their urgency to summon my help: "Dean! Dean! There's a snake... you have to shoot it. Hurry!" I follow them. They form a wary circle around the snake, a rattler with powerfully writhing body as thick as my forearms, and triangular head the size of a fist. I'm in the circle, between the people and the snake. Someone hands me a pistol. It's a Hi Standard .22 semiautomatic with a 5" barrel. I recognize it in the dream, and later when I waken, as the first real pistol I ever held, the one my stepdad Bill Gano taught me how to shoot when I was a kid, setting up bottlecaps on a log to represent snakes' heads. The pistol is totally familiar: the purposeful weightiness, the dully glinting, no-nonsense machined surfaces, the knurled metal grips, the thumb safety and the blade front sight and the notch rear sight at the rear of the slide, even the screws, all as I remember them, in their proper places. The people become more frightened, their urgings more frantic: Hurry, they say, and shoot the snake. You're the only one who can do it. The snake throws its body into a coil of scaly, muscular loops. It cocks its head. It emanates power. The people surge back, their entreaties swelling to an ever higher pitch. I take the pistol and look down at the snake. It's in position to strike, but something is missing, which I notice more viscerally than visually. What is missing is that last critical increment of muscular readiness, the quiver of surgical tubing under tension. As I look closer, I notice that the head, instead of hovering just above the coils, tracking its target in readiness to strike, is still resting on the topmost coil, in a physical attitude which suggests both threat and a certain reluctance. And the mouth, which, if open to strike, would have been a terrifying maw in a snake that size, is still closed. I remember that a rattlesnake ready to strike flares its jaws open to almost 180 degrees in order to point all four fangs at its target. And this snake's eyes are not the cold, unblinking eyes with vertical black pupils I had stared into from six inches away, on the Rogue River, as a teenage boy. They are much larger, softer, moist, and brown, more like a dog's, or even a human's, eyes. The snake looks back at me. Its eyes convey ferocity layered with a deep wisdom; and with more layers of warmth, menace, accusation, resignation, regret, and a slight admixture of pleading. Though the snake does not have a voice, what it says with its eyes reaches my brain, not in words exactly, but still in a form akin to language. Ah, the snake says with its eyes. I guess you have to shoot me. I am, after all, a snake. And yes, I am dangerous. I wish I could promise never to bite any of these people, but I can't. I am what I am. But I'm not that different from you. And if you kill me, what does that make you? The urgings of the people in the circle around the snake and me have become a cacophony. They're aware of the eye-to-eye conversation between me and the snake, and want me to shoot before I have time to think about it. The snake is lying in its coils, its eyes now conveying only sadness and a deep reserve of dignity that says it will not demean itself by trying to avoid its fate. I reach down, pick up the snake, and put it in a burlap bag. I leave the circle. The people howl in surprise and protest, but express relief that the snake is no longer free among them. I walk down a road that leads away from the circle of the snake's accusers - the circle of my people - with the rattlesnake in the bag in my left hand, and the pistol, still loaded and still unfired, in my right. 

Cruz story

                                           RATTLESNAKE DREAMS: COVER STORY

     In the early 1980s a group of veterans, artists, musicians, poets and ne’r-do-wells would hang out, drink beer, and tell stories. Some were true, some were not so true… and some were too true to be endured, but unforgettable all the same.

     Chris Matthews was the owner of our meeting place, the Poet and Patriot Irish pub, in an alley just off Cedar Street in Santa Cruz, near the mall.

He was a beefy Irishman with a booming voice, a giant heart, and a well developed political consciousness. He was also a veteran of the 82^nd Airborne Division, which he never allowed us mere mortals to forget. RIP, Chris. Also among us was Tim McCormick, who had been a Navy medical corpsman patching up wounded Marines near the DMZ in South Viet Nam. Kenny Walker had been a Marine Sergeant in Nam, and was also one of the best natural artists I’ve met. He once mentioned in passing that he’d been standing next to a buddy during an NVA attack on their position when an enemy rocket, sparks trailing, came into their position. Kenny stood up to find his friend still standing, but without his head, which had been taken off by the rocket and replaced by twin crimson fountains spurting from his carotid arteries.

     There was Bill Motto, a wiry, intense, scraggly-bearded two-tour Nam vet (one with 173^rd Airborne), who read more books and articles about the kind of US foreign policy failures and deliberate deceptions of the sort that had led us into Viet Nam, than anyone else we knew. He died too soon (he was about 39) in a fall off a beach cliff near Santa Cruz. RIP, Billy.

     There was Cris DiMaio, who is part Cheyenne, and who as a young Navy doctor had the incredible bad luck of being assigned as Battalion Surgeon to 1/9, 1^ST Battalion, 9^th Marines. 1/9 was reputed to be the infantry battalion that took the highest casualties, among Army and Marine units, in that war. Chris was in our rap group of 7 or 8 vets who met once a week and spilled our guts and hearts and our rage out in a small room in the Vets Hall in Santa Cruz. He wasn’t in the group as a health professional; he was there like the rest of us, trying to heal his own wounds. I had the good luck to visit him, along with my wife, in Santa Cruz in 2012. It was very fine to see him, in his home on the beach near Santa Cruz.

     It had been through Chris DiMaio, by way of one of his Native American connections (Michael Joseph, of the Santa Rosa Ranchería near Fresno) that I was connected with Maco Stewart, the oil millionaire who financed a trip by some North American Indians (and 3 mercenaries) among whom I was included as a journalist in January 1985, to Contra camps in southern Honduras. We made a couple of illegal armed crossings into Sandinista-controlled Nicaragua, crossing the Río Coco in Miskito Indian dugout canoes. (There’s a large section (“Rus Rus”) of stories from that trip in Rattlesnake Dreams.)

     I was one of the vets, occasionally one of the poets, often enough among the ne’r-do-wells, storytellers, and beer drinkers, who met often at the Poet & Patriot.

     Another regular was Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, a Chicano artist who was about half Chris’s size, but with booming voice and heart and political consciousness to match.   

     And talent to over-match.

     My wife and I split the blanket in 1994. We’re still friends; we both have married again). I moved to Oregon, near where I’d grown up. (There are several Oregon stories, from both before and after the war, in Rattlesnake Dreams.) Chris Matthews, the founding owner of Poet & Patriot, died a couple of years ago, from a lifetime of smoking cigarettes. We could always hear it in his gravelly bass voice. Many of us drifted apart… but not really. Now we had the Internet, and gradually we found one another again.

     Also in the ‘80s, I began writing the stuff that had been clawing at my insides to get out into the air since I’d thrown my gear into the back of the truck to leave Chu Lai in 1966.

     With the writing came the dreams and nightmares.

     They pissed me off. No. They terrified, enraged me. They scalded my soul. Hah. I’ll show ‘em: I’ll capture them and use them. Those nightmares were kicking my ass on a regular basis, and like all combat vets, I wanted to escape them.

     Sometime in the early 1980s, after waking too many times drenched in sweat and terrifying my wife with startling transitions from sleep to wakefulness, I decided two things: One was that I would train myself to turn, in sleep and during a nightmare, and confront my pursuers, instead of continuing to flee them.

     And I would learn to write the dreams down.

     For a few years, the process of forcing myself to remember and record the dreams made things worse. Convincing myself that in the long run it was worth it to capture the dreams instead of fleeing them is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made, given the fact that I had lived through the Viet Nam war and, in any case, I could not escape it.

     I do not know of, nor have I read of or been told about, any combat vet who has actually reached the end of his string of post traumatic dreams. [WAIT! I JUST REMEMBERED WILLIAM MANCHESTER'S WONDERFUL BOOK GOODBYE, DARKNESS. THAT'S HIS MEMOIR OF WWII COMBAT IN THE MARINE CORPS, AND HIS OWN RE-VISITATION OF POST-COMBAT NIGHTMARES. I RECOMMEND IT FOR ALL COMBAT VETS, ESPECIALLY MARINES.] I’m sure there are some others; I just haven’t met them. This is why I say – perhaps more often than people want to hear – that I’m the luckiest combat vet I know.

    

   Cruz Ortiz Zamarrón, our artist friend from Poet & Patriot days, had grown up in San Antonio, Texas. He now had relocated to Lake Tahoe, on the California/Nevada line. I had been writing all the time, and a book was shaping up. It was the project I’d promised I would do, as I tossed my gear on the truck to leave Chu Lai. It had stories about growing up in Oregon, because I had begun to see that soldiers – or, in my case, Marines – didn’t come out of nowhere, but were boys who came from American homes, broken or otherwise.

     I had many dreams/nightmares. Some I remembered, captured, wrote down. Some I lost. But sometime during the Poet & Patriot days, while working as a carpenter and contractor, I had a long dream which was clearly from the string of post Viet Nam nightmares. But it was also different. It was very long. It was very clear. In fact, translucent. It was very powerful. It told a story. And it ended well, for me, as one of the two central characters in the dream.

     The other main character was a rattlesnake the size of my arm, but much more powerful. And it spoke to me in the dream. We talked, eye to eye, as the howling circle of my people urged me to kill the snake with the pistol they had given me, and which I now held in my hand.

     That dream is the title piece for this book: Rattlesnake and Pistol.

     I got in touch with Cruz. We exchanged email addresses. I sent him the narrative I’d written about the conversation between the rattlesnake and me, told him I wanted that to be my book cover, and asked him to paint it. He said he couldn’t do it. His body wouldn’t perform; he could no longer hold a paint brush properly with his right arm. I begged him to do it, because of what I knew about him and his art, his relationship with art and life. Please, I said.

He said he’d try to do it with the computer.

     He exceeded my expectations, surprising me in a revelatory way: his painting depicts me, as a young Marine with a pistol, confronting the grandaddy of all rattlesnakes, being urged on by the crowd behind me… all reflected in the rattlesnake’s eye. 

OH, BY THE WAY: look at me. I mean, look at the dream image of the young Marine holding the pistol. That's me, reflected in the rattlesnake's eye, with my people, crowded around behind me, urging me to "Shoot the snake!" Now look at the figure of Dean, as painted by Cruz. Look at my hair. See the letters Cruz painted into my hair, starting over my right ear: "P..E..A..C..E"

I didn't see that, until he told me: PEACE. Cruz told me before he published the painting, so I could have the option of taking it out. I threw back my head and laughed at the sky: "No, Cruz...leave it in. Leave it in!" 

That's our cover. Thank you, Cruz.

Rattlesnake Dreams is available in paperback from Amazon - 398 pages, $22; or as ebook from createspace.com, $8; or ebook from kobo.com, also $8. Your choice.

CONTACT THE AUTHOR: 3dmetcalf@gmail.com

CHEAP THRILLS (POEM)

         Cheap Thrills

(first draft)

In Guatemala Antigua, I once heard a marimba player

tap hardwood bars of logarithmically sequential lengths

with wooden mallets, launching

rich red-brown tones back into the rain forest

whence the resonant bars had come.

Now, as a scrap of seasoned cedar siding

falls, one split at a time, away from blows

of my hatchet, each new piece of kindling

pings its own small gong

against the stone hearth, again teaching my ear

how the marimba must have been invented.

As you see, not much going on here:

just the clutter of my stuff:

a folding oak camp table

littered with past-due bills,

clean socks, egg cartons,

toothbrush, a book of erotic writing

by women. Underneath,

a thousand dollars worth

of work boots: soles charred fighting

wildfires of the summer of  2002, toes scuffed

(the left more than the right) from years of

earning my living as a journeyman carpenter,

shoe-pacs with lugged rubber soles worn smooth

by walking in crusted snow like this, here, that now

darkens, blue to indigo, as this February evening

drapes itself around the shoulders of my cabin.                                            

                                   

                                             Dean Metcalf

                                                      Jan-Feb 2004

PROLOGUE: THO AN

Prologue: Tho An

Tho An

Most of the villagers fled when the shooting began. Others hid and waited out the bombing and strafing and napalm in the holes and tunnels under the village. When the F-4 Phantoms - sharks of the air with high triangular tails and turned-down black snouts - finished their work, we moved into the village and the rest of the people came out of the ground and were held in clusters while the demolitions men placed their charges and blew the tunnels.

     Attached to “F” Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines, I
was ordered to guard a group of Vietnamese. There were several mothers, each with one or more young children, two or three older women who might have been mothers of the mothers, and one old man. There were no young men. I was to hold them in a tight group, watching for hidden weapons, threatening movements or attempts to flee. 

         They were terrified, especially the mothers. Foxtrot

Company’s combat engineers were still blowing up tunnels  not many yards from where we were gathered near the village well. One charge showered us with dirt and the sharp smell of burnt C4 from the blast. A Sergeant cursed the engineer for using too much explosive. An occasional bullet from the firing still going on in the village cracked or buzzed by overhead.

        I’d imagined battle, but I’d never imagined this. The 

children I was guarding shrieked at the noise and flying debris and tried to flee their mothers’ arms. With my rifle slung underarm so it was ready to hand, I moved to stop them with the lowered point of my bayonet, which terrified their mothers even more. One child, a baby boy, was in front of the others and closest to me. He tried to crawl past my feet. His screams were so loud they pounded my ears harder than the explosions of grenades and rifles and machine guns nearby. I lowered my bayonet directly in front of his face, horrified. His mother screamed and snatched him back. All the mothers desperately wanted to flee the explosions, but feared my rifle and bayonet more. They wailed in awful concert with their children. The older women joined.

      But the old man: he didn’t wail, cower, try to flee the explosions or shrink back from my bayonet. He just stared at me, afraid but with that resigned, calculated, limited fearfulness of one who is going to die before long anyway, and with a look of the purest hatred I’d ever seen on a human face.

Something happened, as I looked down my rifle and bayonet at the old man and women and children I was holding captive, which would determine the course of the rest of my life. I looked at those people, then looked around me. I saw, in the bright noon light, a veil dropping. There was a feeling of the veil’s movement having a direction: top to bottom, sky to earth. The veil seemed transparent, leaving the artillery-blasted fronds of the palm trees, their napalm-charred trunks, the flaming thatch and skeletal bamboo frameworks of the huts, the urgent movements of the Marines of “F” company, the terrified people at my feet, all looking exactly as they had a moment before. Yet they also looked completely different. I can’t explain that, except to say that suddenly, and ever after, I saw the world through different eyes.

     But it wasn’t just my present and future which I saw differently. That day in Tho An, a process began of re-seeing my entire life, from as far back as I could remember, and of realizing that a gradual accretion of boyhood experiences, beginning long before I entered Marine Corps boot camp, were what had made me a warrior.

DREAM: CHOCOLATE DONUT NIGHTMARE

DREAM: CHOCOLATE DONUT NIGHTMARE
A couple of years ago, after a years-long string of post Viet Nam nightmares in which I would be pursued by guesome, grimacing enemy soldiers, well armed and intent on killing me, I had what I that was "The Last Nightmare." (See Rattlesnake Dreams, chapters "Money Man Pursuit" and "The Last Nightmare.") All through "The Last Nightmare,"my body felt as if it were erupting like a volcano, until I finally woke up, in a fit of violent laughter. I haven't had one of those dreams since. But just now I awoke from a mid-day nap (erratic sleep patterns). I had dreamed, a half hour ago, that I was showing Edward Snowden around Santa Cruz, California. I was buying us a bag of chocolate donuts, and we were looking for a bench under the trees downtown to sit and eat them. Guess I really am over the nightmares, huh? That is, until I wake up and remember the real one.

BATHING BEAUTIES (POEM)

                                    Bathing Beauties

Del Mar Beach,

California

I.

Slipping sideways under Cinzano umbrellas,

afternoon sun hammers ice

through thin walls of tonic glasses,

extruding beads of lime sweat.

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.

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.

                                                                       ©2012 Dean Metcalf

                                                                                 P.O. Box 548

                                                                                 Joseph OR 97846

                                                                                                                                            3dmetcalf@gmail.com