TPQ OnLine
poetry chapbook by John Samuel Tieman

Clean Today 1/11/96 sober six years and I say morning prayers without speaking I make the coffee while my wife rises I listen without weeping at a sad ballad The sound of the snow on the roof is important, important as fresh bread or the neighbor warming her car important as a plan or an empty chair That's why this morning six years later to the day I hear the slight chimes of the Angelus bells hear the ash settle in my fireplace hear the beauty of my wife's sigh as she sits cross-legged on the edge of the bed and asks half-aware why I'm alive at this hour

Editing --for Denis Lane This other Nam vet comes to see me and wants me to see his manuscript. He brings this nosh, some bagels, so I say OK, let's see it--Yea, OK, I'll read it. So we got some time till later so we swap some Nam stories. He says This is what's pitiful, man. I'm visitin' Jim Mills, this fuck-up all wounded you see. It's this hospital, Nha Trang. From a distance it's all this commotion. But so what? It's Nam. I got directions to Jim Mills and I got to pass this commotion. I start up some stairs, begin to look a little into this second floor when halfway up the flight I see nuthin' but runnin' feet and screams. Just runnin' feet, some bunches of blood pools and some screams. I got to turn before I see completely in and there's the nurse all white right there at the door. I got to ask Hey What The Hell Lady? but she's just sittin', just sittin' at this desk. Imagine report writin' at the door of the screams. So I look. The screams are a dozen guys--I can't tell black from whose white and they're all runnin' and bangin' walls and leavin' whole body--I mean the full body on the wall blood stains and they're naked 'cause all the napalm left was no skin. Nuthin'. Not even no boots. So I beg the nurse Do Somethin'! But she says Any More Morphine And They'll Die! Finally I see she's just as freaked and fakin' calm and nobody knows what to do so I go off on her when one guy runs up at my face and he's just goin' Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama Mama and like that. (I always feel bad for that nurse 'cause she's maybe 23 and in charge of a platoon of the dead or what's left.) So I walk off, find some quiet and just stuff my mouth with my fatigue shirt and scream till I can't stop. And when Jim Mills later asks What's that back there man? I say, you know how we said, Don't mean nuthin', man. It just don't mean nuthin'.

	Prodigal When I think of myself at 10 or 15, I think of Our Lady Of Perpetual Help, Her promises of mercy which made me believe my faith would stop my father from drinking, my mother from screaming. So I'd light one more candle, say one more rosary, bargain one more deal with Jesus, promise, like my mother promised my dad, You give me peace or I'll give you hell. Between 16 and 40, I lit no more candles, prayed no novenas, kept no promises except one: to be that angry bastard who abandons God. Hear me now God. It took me decades to regain my faith, sanity, sobriety. Now my father's dead, my mother 88, and again for them I pray, except this time I make no promises.

On Lines By Wen I-To Perhaps you wept and wept and weep no more. Perhaps. Perhaps you ought to sleep a bit: shelve the love letter, put out the cat, let the clock run down. Let me pull the shade, shut out a god's blue claw, aurora borealis. No one will wind the clock while I'm around. I will knit you a quilt of white vines. Perhaps your eyes will settle on a photo on the eastern wall, not the one of you nursing your firstborn or the one of the lover who just left, but the one unclear, the blur in which, perhaps, I will spin you a dream, a pure dream, pure as an Aztec place name -- Aztlan, Tlalpan, Tepeyacac -- a sane dream, sane as an exotic island -- Iona, Antigua, Dominica -- a complete dream, complete as a manuscript in Carolingian minuscule, as a priestess of Isis, as the Scythian name for eclipse. A home. The floor of coral, obsidian and platinum, the walls of salt crystal, a roof of bleached ebony. A simple world where a geranium may blaze in your face, where a woman's skin is quicksilver, where maps shatter, shards, where all words are whispers and only an echo fills the air.

The Child In White

C. S., 1978 - 90
for her father

Ever since the war, something shrill
sings along your nerves, messages
like artillery coordinates

in a code no one knows.
Like the way lightening
clears the way for thunder

there are many ways to practice death.
Finding her body for one,
half-naked, the maniac

still in the neighborhood,
some guy you meet at the grocery.
For days the sun touched her teeth:

Not knowing how to stop
you remember her body
dead then alive then dead again.

The camera zooms in.
The reporter gets some fine lines but
your vow of vengeance pleases her most.

Who wouldn't grieve
the child in white,
who wouldn't grieve

as the prosecutor drags you
before the twelve elders
to recount the bruises

on her neck, on her thighs.
Who wouldn't grieve
as night after night

you strangle that bastard
over and over and over until
even his death isn't enough

death for the life of your daughter.
Now you too believe the evidence
of her azure lips

like all the other clues
the Major Case Squad missed:
The blood on the leaves,

the yellow frost, a fine ice.
You bear them as any father would bear
her empty room through the seasons

until they too turn
into a tender felon --
a winter, finally, of forgiveness.

---

Copyright © 1998 by John Samuel Tieman

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