MOMENT (POEM)

Moment

1964: South China Sea

It is hours

into the night.

We are in the bowels

of the attack transport

USS Pickaway.

We are marines: young

warriors, powerful, and

think we are stronger yet.

Vietnam is a word

we barely know. Soon, and

forever, Vietnam will be

the only word we know. A gale

slaps the ship about

like a volleyball.

Our bunks are

tubular steel and canvas,

side by side,

six high. There are

two hundred of us

in a compartment the size

of your living room

if you are moderately

well off. The walls are

half inch steel plate

painted battleship gray. The light

is from single bulbs, each

inside a heavy glass globe

inside a steel cage.

This is to protect the light bulb

from the kind of men we are, and from

heavy things which fly across the compartment

when the ship is at sea

on a night like tonight.

The battleship gray walls

and the glass globes in their steel cages

drip beads of sweat

from saltwater showers. The smells are

sweat, saltwater and puke.

We can’t sleep

for being slammed into

one another. The ship

is hammered

by a heavy sea,

shudders,

nose-dives

into the next.

“Je-sus Christ!”  is uttered loudly

by one of the grunts

from Delta Company.

From another bunk comes,

shouted, “Jesus Christ

blows elephants

for a nickel a herd!”

The laughter is chopped

by a silence, as we wonder

whether the power

that’s just been insulted

is the same as that

which threatens the ship.

Then, from a third bunk:

“Hey. Knock that shit off.”

Now another silence, as

each of us signs

a secret document saying

he is afraid of the wind.                                                      ©Dean Metcalf

                                                                                   11/26/2002

CANAL

I was just a kid. These few moments in a barber shop in Klamath Falls, Oregon - and then in the large irrigation canal which ran past outside - had more to do with the formation of my character than any other hour or so of my entire youth.

Canal

     I’d just turned 15. We had moved across town to a little rented house on Coli Avenue, a dirt street one block long overlooking Klamath Lake. It was just the three of us again; Mom had divorced Bill Gano before we left the project, as she would later do with her fourth and fifth husbands.

     When it was time to get a haircut, I'd take a bus across town to my favorite barber shop near the project. It was at the far end of a bridge across the big irrigation canal that ran through town. 

     People were always drowning, or nearly drowning, in that canal. It was wide and deep and its banks were steep and hard to climb out of, not like most river banks. It was late winter the time I went for this haircut; the water was muddy and thin ice lined its edges. Everyone knew that old cars and other junk lined its bottom, ready to snag any kids brash enough to ignore their parents' warnings. Of all the stupid things we did in those days, I never knew anyone who swam in that canal except this one person, this day.

     The barbers were three older men. I liked them, and the place, and the customers. It was a man's place, where boys were welcome. Stories were told: fish stories, hunting stories, work stories, war stories, brokendown pickup stories, stories about women. They kept it pretty clean when kids were in the shop, but had a way of telling one another what they had to tell without coming right out with the fourletter words. Not too many, anyway. It was: Here, boy, here's your peek behind the green door. But if your mom asks, we didn't say anything that bad. 

     I was sitting in the chair with about half my head cut when a woman burst into the shop, gasping "There's a woman in the canal, she's goin' under!" 

     We all ran out. A crowd was gathering on the bridge, pointing downstream and towards the levy that formed the opposite bank. Some of us from the shop ran across the bridge and down the road that formed the top of the levy. Everyone was pointing and jabbering, but no one was going down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, Claude, the barber who’d been cutting my hair, and I were out front. Then I was down the bank, trying to reach the woman as she drifted past, and trying to keep myself on the bank by grabbing at tufts of grass. She was too far out, and the grass didn't hold. 

     I turned, looked up the bank. "Gimme somethin' to reach...." But nothing came: no rope, no 2x4, no long stick.

     The next thing I saw is what I will remember for the rest of my life. I saw the way the people had arranged themselves, the way their line of faces welled in my vision as I looked up, my feet down at the waterline, beseeching them for help.

     Most of the people were back on the bridge, standing safely behind the rail, pointing excitedly, not moving to help. They were watching something happen to someone else, like spectators at a ball game. Others scurried about on top of the levy, talking with adrenaline-jerked movements about what was happening, what should be done, looking for something I could use to reach the woman.

     And there was Claude, the kindly, slightly overweight, nearly bald barber in his late fifties or sixties who'd been cutting my hair. He was just over the cusp of the bank, holding the hand of someone above him, holding my hand with his other. My feet were in the water. The universe, which had been wheeling, slowed wonderfully, narrowed, focused. The next time I would have that feeling would be eight years later, in a Vietnamese village named Tho An. 

     I looked at Claude. Up to that instant, it had seemed that each time my eyes met a face in my desperate search for help, that face had simply rejected my gaze, thrown it back at me. But now as I looked up at him, he looked back in a way that was different from everyone else on the canal. My vision took on a cinematographic effect: everything to either side of us, especially all the other useless faces, became blurry. His face came into sharp focus in front of mine, and seemed to move closer than the two arm--lengths still between us. It seemed inches away. He spoke calmly. His meaning was transmitted more by the way his eyes looked into mine than by his words, which were: "There's only you and me. I'd go in, but I got a bad heart. I'd be dead as soon as I hit that water." Then he just looked into my eyes. At that moment I loved Claude for his clarity, and knew that he wasn't lying or making excuses, that he really would have gone in the water if he thought there was a chance of ending up with two live people instead of two dead people. 

     It was good enough for me. I scrambled up the bank, ran along it till I was a few yards downstream from the woman, whose head only now and then broke the surface, and jumped as far out as I could. The water was cold, but I scarcely felt it. I swam out to her. She was too far gone to struggle, which helped. But she was overweight; it felt like trying to tow a waterlogged stump in a dinghy. 

     I got her in to shore. By now there was more help. We horsed her up the bank. I remember thinking how undignified she looked, and hoped she didn't mind how we were handling her. An ambulance came and took her away.                 

     

Somebody gave me a ride home, so I could shuck my wet clothes and dance off the shivers in front of the oil heating stove. I changed into dry clothes and the man who’d brought me took me back to the barber shop and Claude finished cutting my hair. I was the talk of the barbershop, but Claude and I didn't say much. We just looked at each other, feeling a little apart from the others. He didn't charge me for the haircut.

     The woman lived. She never bothered to thank me. She had jumped, not fallen, into the canal. She had mental problems, and apparently had made other attempts at suicide.           

     A good thing I got out of that afternoon was what I learned about time: when it's time to move, don't fuck around. Everybody on the canal that day except Claude and me had milled around in what I considered a deadly mixture of fear and incompetence. Even I had waited too long. As I have relived the experience over the years, one thing jumps out: those few seconds right after an emergency happens are the richest time, the time when a simple, well-directed movement can save lives, can turn the course of events. A fire that can be put out with a shovel and a cool head one moment can become, in a minute, a huge and killing thing. What will seem recklessness to some can actually be the safest thing to do, to snuggle right up to the danger, to seize the situation in its early seconds and turn it towards life and away from death.

AT THE BATTERED WOMEN'S SHELTER

At the Battered Women's Shelter

     Marshall Sachs called and said he was donating money to the Battered Women's Shelter in Santa Cruz for improvements they needed, and asked if I'd donate my labor to make and install kitchen cupboards if he bought the materials. 

     Like anyone who goes to the shelter, I had to promise not to reveal its location, so none of the husbands or boy friends who had been beating these women - and, in some cases, their kids as well - could find them and finish what they'd started.

  The shelter was just another house in a quiet neighborhood. I worked there for two or three weeks, spreading my sawhorses, tools, and materials out on the concrete driveway beside the house. I'd finish cutting a few pieces, then go in a side door, wind around furniture and kids playing with their toys on the floor, and on into the kitchen to nail up the new pieces. It was onsite cabinet work, sort of. 

     The place was crowded, and my being there made it more so. There was no way around that, but the women tried to leave me as much space as they could, and while they couldn't keep their kids from being fascinated with what I was doing - that always happens - they managed to convince them to heed my admonitions not to touch the power tools or the pneumatic nail gun. 

     As I worked among the women in that crowded space, I overheard bits of their stories, and of their conversations with one another about who should go back to her man, who should not. It was all there: it was really my fault, I shouldn't have pissed him off like that when he'd been drinking/ no, that's his fault, not yours/ I'm going to give him one more chance once he simmers down, he promised not to do it again/ no, you can't go back, that's what he says every time....

     One day I was working in the driveway, being watched with wide eyes by two little Mexican girls, sisters about four and five years old. They'd taken a shine to me because I was doing something interesting and because they'd found out I could speak Spanish with them. 

    Working on a cabinet in the driveway, I was hammering: either driving nails or assembling something like a mortise and tenon joint. I was trying to pay attention to what I was doing and still talk with the girls.

     At a particularly sharp blow of my hammer, the younger girl flinched and sucked in a startled breath that stopped our conversation. She turned to her sister and asked in Spanish, "Is he going to hit us?" 

     The older girl looked at me for a long moment with eyes like some foolproof radar of the soul, then answered: "No, he's only working."

SPIDER AND FLY

Spider and Fly

     I came home one afternoon in late 1976 to my house on Chestnut Street in Santa Cruz. I'd been working in the building trades since leaving the boats, and was trading work for rent, building my first complete house behind the one I lived in. I had recently gotten my general contractor's license.

     I walked across the living room, past the fireplace, and into the kitchen where sun was streaming in through the windows. I started putting groceries away in the fridge. The windows faced south, so that the afternoon sun warmed the red quarry tile floor and threw shadows of the windows' wooden bars and muntins into parallelogrammed patterns across the sink, stove, and countertop.      

     I lived alone. The kitchen was quiet. But I had just closed the refrigerator door when a loud buzz caught my attention from a lower corner of one of the windows. It was a big bluebottle fly, buzzing with such intensity that the sound filled the room. The fly was having trouble with a spider's web that was spun across the corner of the window. A small spider came scooting across the glass, waved its legs near the fly, backed away. I got a kitchen chair and moved it up to just beyond arm's length and sat down. 

     Obviously, it would be no contest. The web was no more than a few frail strands, not yet ready for a quarry   several times larger and more powerful than the spider, whose legs were nearly as delicate as the strands of its web. The fly still had both wings free, and was buzzing loudly, trying to get enough lift to pull its legs out of the web. 

     The spider darted out again, near the fly but just out of reach of its great thrashing wings. The spider waved its forward legs again, as if giving some arachnidic benediction, but from this close I could see the spider stretching a strand of web between its two forward legs, and offering that strand to the sacrificial buzz saw of the fly's wings. 

     The fly instantly snapped that strand, seeming not to notice it. It continued to struggle to free its legs, but could only free one leg by pushing at the web with another, which trapped the liberating leg. The spider pulled back, seeming to rest or to give up. But then it scooted forward again, and again offered its nettlesome benediction. As before, the fly snapped it immediately; as before, the spider backed just out of danger to rest, and to spin another strand. 

     The world's time - that is, time outside of what was happening in one corner of one pane of that old twelve-light double-hung window - began to dissolve for me. Minutes, or hours, might have passed. The battle became a ballet, a pas de deux between the raging fly and the tiny, impudent, darting spider, coming in with its frail monofilament offerings. The forcefield generated by their antagonistic movements drew me closer to the battle, seeming to magnify the two creatures. I began to see the motion of the spider's legs, as it attempted to lasso the fly with puny strands, as similar to the parenthetic arcs of a ballerina's arms in opposing crescents above her head during a pirouette. The fly became a furious neo-mechanical monster with blue and green and black metallic glints flashing off the segmented head and thorax, its translucent but formidable wings the instruments of its rage.      

     I leaned in closer. Now, among the flinty pulses of light being emitted by the writhing of the fly's body, a new source of color appeared. As the fly revved its wings, trying to get enough lift to pull itself free of the web that still held its legs, a quick tiny flash of rainbow would appear along the top edge of the fly's left wing, the one nearest the spider. The spider kept moving back, spinning, darting in with a new strand that the thrashing wing would instantly break. But the rainbow glints of light, refracted by the strands' residue on the fly's wing, came more often, lasted longer, and grew in size until a strand of web became visible between the wing and the body of the fly, darting violently with the wing's motion, snapping but then reconstituting itself as the spider added more material, until the strand became a cable, then a net, and that wing suddenly stilled, lashed now to the fly's body. The roar of the fly's wings was cut in half. The spider moved cautiously up on the disarmed side, threw a few more strands in place to make sure the wing was secure, then circled around to the fly's opposite side, patiently repeating the process until the great blue fly was trussed, immobile, silent. 

     "There it is," I said. "Vietnam." 

THE CORNER OF THE OLD MAN'S DYING (POEM)

                          Time Passing                        
(The Corner of the Old Man's Dying)
                              by Dean Metcalf
                                     ©1970, 2013


As I was swingin' down the street
ebullient, bloody-knuckled, easy
I elbowed past an old man,
bent over his cane, eyes rolled
to peer from beneath his hatbrim,
shuffling toward whatever it was
I hurried toward.

Now, nothing in my swagger
should have let that old man speak to me.

But something in his stumbling
screamed at me:

as I was striding by
a tiny blue-flamed glance
flickered from his eye

(his whole life had
     shriveled to a mote there)

and that glance visited the room
next door to the room where words
are born, then heliarced itself
from his brain to mine
saying something that,
had it passed through
the room where words are born,
would have been this:

"I see,
in your striding,
the man I was.

Do you see
who you'll be
in my shuffle?"

MAN AND PISTOL

Man and Pistol

     One evening at Chu Lai I got off radio watch and went behind the tents to the little illegal club we'd built for ourselves. Every man there was drunk. Minutes after I'd leaned my elbow on the plank we used for a bar, grabbed the church key that was always handy and popped open a can of beer, Sergeant Williams, who was standing about five feet from me, pulled out his .45 semiautomatic pistol and worked the slide. It slammed home, steel on brass on steel.

     There was a sharp scuffling sound of bootsoles leaving rough lumber, then a collective oof! of the breath being knocked out of everyone but Williams and me as they hit belly-down on the shipping pallets we'd laid as a floor. Williams was so drunk he could barely stand. He waved the pistol, now loaded, cocked, and off safety, from side to side. Since I was standing directly in front of him, it was pointed mostly at me. 

     Several things became jarringly clear to me. The first was that I was looking my own immediate violent death in the face. The second was that it was entirely up to me to resolve the situation, because I was the only sober person there. The third thing was that if I made a mistake about how to relate to Williams...see realization number one. 

     I studied him as though my life depended on understanding him, since it did. He did not seem particularly angry; he did not seem about to shoot. At least, not on purpose or at anyone in particular. He was just a normally harmless guy with a loaded pistol and something to prove. He did seem to have so little physical control of himself that, since his finger was on the trigger and the safety was off, an accidental discharge was highly likely, especially if he were bumped. Or challenged.

     He seemed...well, lonely. He seemed to want attention. Military outfits are like all societies; they have their cliques, their insiders and outsiders. Williams was a Sergeant, but no one respected him very much. He wasn't particularly good at his job, or brave, or funny. He didn't stand out in any way or have any special claim to anyone's loyalty. He didn't have any close friends. I remember one time when he tried to be friendly. He was sitting on the ground outside our tent, drinking with Martin Luther Ealy. Ealy was a laughing, generous man, a 250pound cook from New Orleans who was particularly proud of his black heritage. Sgt. Williams draped his arm around Ealy's powerful shoulders and said, in all sincerity, "Y'know, Ealy, for a nigger, you're a pretty good guy." Ealy convulsed with sobs, having chosen that reaction instead of killing Williams.

     Suddenly Williams seemed at once dangerous and pathetic to me. This guy wants respect, I thought. He pulled his weapon because he couldn't get respect or attention any other way.

     I began to talk to him, with one elbow leaning on the bar in as casual a pose as I could manage, but with my nerves firing as if I had two fingers plugged into a wall socket. The pistol's muzzle was three or four feet from my gut. This was the M1911A1 .45 caliber semiautomatic, with which I’d qualified on the firing range, becoming familiar with its heavy recoil. I’d been told it leaves an exit wound the size of a man’s fist, by at least one man who had inflicted such a wound.

     I asked him how things had been going, how things were back home. He began to talk a little, still waving the pistol, not all over the place, but just back and forth in front of him as he reeled, which meant mostly at me, since I was so close. His concentration, such as he had, was on the cigar stub he was puffing. When he mentioned something, I would ask his opinion about it. I was very respectful. 

     I began to admire his pistol. My first tentative compliments seemed to please him, so I committed in that direction: "A very fine weapon, yessir, a very fine piece. You must take mighty good care of it. Can I see it?" 

     He proudly handed me the pistol, muzzle still towards me. I slowly turned it to point at a spot on the floor where no one was lying, let the hammer down tenderly, slipped the magazine out, and cleared the chamber. There was a sucking sound of air re-entering lungs as Marines began scraping themselves off the pallets. 

ZEN WARRIOR BASS PLAYER

Zen Warrior Bass Player

     Annie and I were out one night in Capitola, a little beach town near where we lived. We were walking past a small Victorian house when we heard music coming from inside. It had been made into a coffeehouse, and a jazz combo was playing. We went in.

     The space was tiny. There were only three or four tables, with a few extra chairs against the walls. A spinet piano was wedged into one corner. A drummer with a small trap set and an acoustic bass player were crowded close to the piano.

     They were pretty good, and we liked being that close to the musicians. Everyone in the room was listening, keeping voices low, except for one man who obviously had quite a bit of alcohol aboard. He kept talking in a voice loud enough to interfere, in that small space, with hearing the music. Pointed glances bounced right off him. Someone tried to shush him, at which point he made a belligerent retort, and carried on all the louder. 

     Finally the bass fiddle player, a stocky, balding, kindly looking man in his fifties who reminded me of Claude, the barber who had helped me pull the old woman from the canal in Klamath Falls when I was a kid, stopped playing and just looked at the noisemaker. The other two musicians stopped playing. The bass player, with as much civility as he could muster, posed a general question to everyone in the room: Did we want to hear the music? Everyone nodded, saying Yes (some emphatically), except the noisy one. The bass player looked at him, asking him basically How about it, can you go along with the majority?

     The noisemaker took all this as a challenge. He bawled out that they could go ahead and play their fucking music if they wanted to, and he would go ahead and talk if he wanted to. It was a fucking free country. Unless, of course, the bass player wanted to try and shut him up.

     The bass player shrugged, with a combination of resignation and disgust, and said, Well then, would you like to step outside? We were all startled. The loudmouth was big, obviously a violent type, and a good twenty years younger than the musician. 

     He leaped from his chair. You bet, he said. He stepped to the door. The bass player carefully laid aside his instrument, stood up, met him there. The bass player opened the door, bowed in mock chivalry. "After you," he said. We were all agape. He was actually going through with it. 

     The loudmouth puffed up even further and stomped out the door. The bass player calmly closed the door behind the other man, locked it, walked back to his chair, and picked up his fiddle. We all cheered and clapped. The man outside banged on the door and rattled the knob. But he could see through the door's glass the reaction of all of us. Realizing he'd been beaten, he cursed his way down the steps.