The house holds fast the measure of a man:
a beam draws tight, the stair accepts the strain.
Her rocking keeps the upper dark aground,
his voice breaks down to timber, dust, and grain.
She rocks the boys as ballast, not as kin,
their legs gone slack with years they haven’t lived.
The night instructs them how a man comes in
and how his body must at last be moved.
I’ve seen this passage set inside the bone:
the pull from father into son made plain,
a tensile line no hand can call its own,
drawn tight by care, by duty, and by pain.
It held until I felt him start to fall;
no law remained—just balance, weight, and wall.

For Verla Francoeur

Something wakes inside a numbered lock.
The hands move over banks of wire and tooth;
each breath a calculation, each slow knock
a pulse, a breach the cipher opens through:
the cold thing at the center turns and turns—
a dark fidelity, a mouth that takes
what enters there, gives nothing back, but churns
the husk to signal till the body shakes—
a secret comes up through the floor in waves:
the vessel holds it, shows the way a jaw
unhinges in the dark, the way it splays
a signal turning red, the panel raw
as punctures driven into skin.
But that is where the light gets in.

His hands are frozen to the kite,
each moment flashing like a prayer; jointed
metal ribbons keening on a power line;
the arc’s dominion, finding its appointed
path through marrow and the salt of him: frees
the flesh to signal. They anoint him,
as the line descends, bearing odd degrees—
he walks the valleys of the Nephilim,
bends their instruments, sees malefic
visions of an older covenant—his father
rising from the black Pacific
casting hieroglyphs on water,
every lightning bolt a cross;
every hour a soldier lost.

Tape #5: To Representative Garner Shriver, 4th District, Kansas

I knew his name, then Sơn Mỹ knew it too,
the afternoon unmaking private Jack
in one clean sound. The rest came nameless; new
and faceless, ma; that’s how you keep your shit intact
in Country. Just like yesterday, Sơn Tịnh:
a mine took one and left the other shaking
photographs at me—him, his girl, thin
last arguments, the body making
cases to whoever’s left, the margins gone,
his leg Gomorrah-black—what God reveals
to hands the mind can’t hold for long:
Grace sealed in plastic as her lover squeals
that bright arterial song, with both
my hands inside his upper thigh, the sworn
and ancient dark of it, the living growth,
a stranger’s flesh, the morning newly torn
above Hội An, a leg, another dead, the worth
of Lucky Strikes pressed warm into my palm;
Da Nang, my rifle laid against the earth—
the Captain’s smile, the road’s long ready psalm.

Your severed hands, suspended in a jar,
cohoba roots that reach through brine—
the fingers casting shadows on the floor,
a lantern ambered with formaldehyde.
Your rusted shirt behind the door—
a flag that no one came to claim,
a banner with the edges charred
and stains that grow at night, like flames
of Santa Rita on the schoolhouse wall—
beneath the ribs, the slow amoebic burn:
the jungle blooming in your bowels,
the night unthreading root to worm.
I keep the bullet in a box: a blunted
talisman, a remnant of the hunt.

It lodged, just like a broken tooth,
inside your throat— a seed that found
a channel, took an older route
and flowered there, sustained beyond
a bolted room, keeps turning over
in your sealed mouth. Beyond the window
trumpets line the Churo river,
thin processions to Rosario,
where Mary waits in effigy. I shut
your eyes, two moons still pulling
at the tide of blood. Beneath my thumb
your iris opened wide: something swimming
in that depth that would not come to shore;
one final wave still breaks against my door.

I. Compus

You came with ships and cane,
your god, your boots across our backs —
seven bloodlines of your name, and de stain
don’t wash—the flames turned black,
his palms above the wick, a bottle set
to spinning on a stool beside the bunk—
it turned all the while, turning, turning yet,
the chant beneath it like a man half-drunk.
De pwen done find you, can’t come free,
Mèt Kalfou open, cord been drawn—
de Loa cho is coming, you don’t see—
his eyes gone wide as country, wide as dawn—
He got you now—the bokor smiled—you been engage.
O Frenchie, he done open up de gate.

II. The Sweep

Helen’s easy breath was at my neck,
the soju sweetened on the tongue,
when canvas lifted off the trucks, flecked
the road with KNP—a dozen, young
and hard, with shears for any man whose hair
fell past the collar; beat them where they stood,
or ran them through, the village square
become a yard where men took what they could—
the yobos shoved aside or struck,
until one officer got ringed, and felt
his hair torn out in matted bloody clumps.
Park Chung-hee should die for this! I yelled—
then canvas swung across the trucks, sealed,
and Bong Il Chon went quiet, unconsoled.

III. The Suit

He peeled his gloves and laid them on the chair
like severed hands—then coat, then tripod, then
the lens aimed at the Quonset window where
the wall rose twenty feet. Look through it. When
you see those stones, he said, above the wall—
forty thousand PRK, waiting on the other side—
your orders, fight them man to man until
Inchon, into the sea. You understand? He smiled:
The Hunzikers, your Alpine blood, the snow–
you wonder why those Asian features sit
that way on you? The Imjin corridor below—
your ruthless forebears crested it.
Remember, John, whose side you’re on. He dressed,
packed up his lens, and left the rest.

IV. The Ambush

A bar, the agitator’s shove, the fist
I never saw—then black came down like weight,
like something from a butcher’s list
of what I owed, the interest paid—
I surfaced in a mirror, my face a page
of broken lines, a nose gone sideways, blood
dried in the creases—ten shades past the edge
of green, then fell again into the flood
of spirits, in and out of x-ray sites
and last, the back of a deuce-and-a-half,
some private giving me my final rites,
who dropped me in my bunk. Compus laughed
above me, in the dark. What did I ever do to you?
I asked. It’s nothin’ Frenchie—nothin’ but Mèt Kalfou.

V. Helen

A bottle set to spinning on a stool,
turning, turning yet—a rocket sound
now rising from its throat. I knew the rule:
to see inside its mouth was death. She came around
through dark and lay beside me, hair pressed
flat against my throat, the coal stove ticking down—
and something in the room denied the rest
of ordinary air, a sweetness grown
to blight; twin halos blooming at the bulb’s
cold filament, the pressure dropping slow
as breath withdraws—I found the rags she pulled
inside the flue, felt carbon working through
my blood, and heard her voice beyond the sun:
Me and you, we die, we go to happy mountain.

Something stirs when the lid comes down—
not courage, something older in the blood,
a red and formless chrysalis below the ground,
where fear blooms inward from a husk.
The dark has weight, it presses like a thumb
on the softest spot behind the eye. The wood
breathes back whatever breathing you become—
spent, animal, and less than understood.
This is the oldest school. The buried seed
does not know spring has come, and does not care:
it simply will not rot. Below the creed,
below the flag, below the ruse—down where
the self goes blind and then begins to see:
the box was always there, young Jeremy.

For Donald Francoeur

I. January

It’s 9 AM. I fill my light blue coffee pot and listen:
Deagle says that China has its missiles poised from Venezuela—
Soros means to make the USA a third world nation.

I bought canned oysters—that cold current spares Korea,
runs northwest through the Bering Sea,
those cans untouched, clean of Fukushima.

They’re spinning out another scheme—
a plague to kill the whole Pacific: whales float
now, belly-up, their food chain bleached.

Dear nephew, what concerns me most
are prophecies—Christ, Daniel, and the Revelation:
an asteroid off the Venezuelan coast

turns our axis, throws up land and mountains
just to free the Gold—with seven billion avatars created,
parasites to eat the oil slicks, replace the humans.

Ancient wheels of Masonry and Priesthood
raised the pyramids, with blocks that weighed a hundred tons,
just like that man in Florida, way down in Homestead.

Secrets lost in the land of the dead:
Gravitics—just Google that. My work is done.

II. March

It’s 5 AM and the house is flooding.
I go room to room by sound—electric pops
in walls, same current Grandad taught, upending

what the dikes were built to hold. This rain
no accident—the solar flares burned
all of Wichita to dust, Black Sunday,

1935. Too cold to riot now, but They’ll return
the first hot day, as sure as wheat breaks open
on the plains and June tornadoes start to churn.

Dialysis is hard, dear nephew, Grandma Verla’s end
now mine, much colder than the flood
and going under, week by week, and then

the aftermath—Arby’s and three Seagrams in the blood
with speakers on the RBN, my weather radar green,
my Ruger 9 still cooling on the Nova’s hood.

The trees bud right on time to give us shade; it’s spring,
our people sealed in cellars then, before the Bowl,
like spirits kneeling in the dark, like carnies,

nephew—I mean canaries—
in the winter coal.