Four Poems by Peter Mladinic

 

Coke Bottle Lenses

 

All his life he couldn’t see

and then he could and then he died.

I never saw him sans coke bottle lenses,

but they were gone.  He’d had a procedure. 

The VA picked up the tab.

You might be thinking, he got in the army,

 

held and aimed an M16, and his sight

was poor?  Yes.  And was even in Viet Nam

and didn’t shoot anyone or get shot.

I last saw him in the parking lot

of a four-floor condo complex in Florida.

Months passed.  Over the phone he spoke

 

with enthusiasm, a sound of wonder,

about the blessing of seeing things clear:

the big W of the Waffle House sign

off the highway, the GMC logo on his SUV,

colours in a shirt he buttoned in a mirror.

Alone in his South Carolina apartment

 

he keeled over, maybe toppled from couch

to carpet.  In ’68 “back in the world,”

upstairs, the house he grew up in, he taped

a strip of mint green paper with black letters,

Duck Lizard Permit on a wall.

I asked what it meant, he never told me.

 

He wasn’t a hunter, and scoffed at people’s

differentiating: an outside dog,

an inside dog.  He himself had a Shepherd,

Bear, I never met, that was years ago.

He himself looked like a lion, and spoke

in snorts and had crude handwriting.

 

Robert Taylor, printed on the return address

on envelopes I opened through the years.

The VA doctor had told him he needed

a stent in a vein to prevent blockage,

to keep the blood flowing. He couldn’t walk

on sand because of his bad knees.

 

College Classroom

 

No pretty girls to impress,

no Jill teasing Cathy’s hair up front,

no James, his head on a desk in back

with me going down to shake his shoulder.  Wake up!

No expounding my thoughts on what’s on the white board

in blue marker,

telling them how Cullen’s “To a Lady I Know,” four lines,

would be altogether different if “even” was not in

“She even thinks that up in heaven,”

with two or three actually listening.

 

This is Friday afternoon.

I’m alone in a spacious sea of empty desks,

erasing something, not Cullen, off the board.

Up in a corner

a TV on a black steel contraption hangs suspended.

On the screen breaking news: the Challenger exploded.

A flashback of the coned rocket’s lift-off in a smoke cloud,

power ascending.

A flashback of astronauts, helmets in hand,

among them Christa McAuliffe, the New Hampshire teacher,

in a blue jumpsuit, smiles into a crowd of photographers,

the first teacher to go into space.

 

The classroom was across the hall from my office.

White board erased,

I looked up at the screen, a man with papers on a desk,

a Windsor knot in his tie, his face

a struggle between professional and startled.

Today, recalling that day in 1986, I think of Countee Cullen’s

“She even thinks that up in heaven

  her class lies late and snores.”

 

The Dead

 

James Joyce’s “The Dead” is the final story

in his collection Dubliners.

 

I wasn’t Lily at the start of the party

bitter about the men these days

who wanted her only for what they

could get out of her, nor was I Gretta

 

at the end at a window, with snow

falling fast in the dark, lost in her memory

of Michael Furey.   I was Gretta on the stairs

listening,  enraptured as Bartell D’Arcy

 

sang “The Lass of Aughrim.”

I was in love,  looking up the staircase,

hearing “The Lass of Aughrim”

when the water welled and spilled

 

a little onto bags under my eyes,

the water standing as I stood

feeling the warmth of one who was absent.

Young Michael Furey cared for me

 

when I cared not a jot for him.  He died.

Joyce nailed music and memory,

as did Baldwin in “Sonny’s Blues,”

maybe the greatest American story.

 

In “Notes of a Native Son,” music

takes Baldwin back to childhood,

His father dabbed iodine on his scraped

knee.  Like Joyce, he knew music

 

and memory’s stomping ground,

the human psyche.  I was Gretta

on the stairs rapt in rhythms of a voice,

only I wasn’t like Gretta seeing Michael Furey.

 

I’d none of her nobility with me that night.

I suppose I was more like Lily about men.

I was about a woman I felt things for.

When Byron wrote “She walks in beauty”

 

she was the one he was talking about.

There I sat, thinking “I’m over you.” 

Many times those words came out of a juke

in a county bar at night.  I was at home.

 

I was fine, then I was Gretta on the stairs

hearing not Belle D’Arcy but you. 

I felt jittery when you smiled.  Later,

out Getta’s window the snow was falling.

 

Forgery

 

I have done a thing that blooms

in me like a rose in snow.  I forged my

father’s name on a note, Krogstad

has found. Krogstad with his,  “Everyone

thinks of that,  how would you do it,

Mrs. Helmer?  In the river, under the ice

to float up..all bloated?”  No, not that.

 

Christine Linde, my true friend, says

“There are in this house

dark corners on which light must shine.”

I have my dear Doctor Rank,

“I have always loved you, Nora,

you must have known.”  Last should be

first, Torvald. “What about your duties

as a wife, a mother, your duties to God?”

 

That thing I was waiting for never happened.

Torvald never stepped up, never said

“I will take the blame.”  Yes, I lied

on paper. Signing my father’s name

I became for a moment someone other

than myself.  I bend and pluck a rose

from a snowbank, and have that rose

in my hand. Forget the pen that lied.

 

Forget Krogstad’s threat, Doctor Rank

in his ardour, Torvald at a desk

in his inner sanctum. I am leaving

his house, these three children we share.

“Your duties as a mother, your duties

to God.”  I have done something Torvald

must never know of. I am leaving

his life. I have in mine this red flower

I’ve plucked from the snow.

Peter Mladinic’s fifth book of poems, Voices from the Past, is available from Better Than Starbucks Publications.

An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, United States.