Typing WWII Letters (i. m. R.A. Usher)

There’s a man naked fishing

on a Guadalcanal beach

one day when Japanese planes

have paused their bombing runs

and the U.S. offshore big guns

are not plastering what remains

of the Solomons’ vegetation.

His mind keeps casting to a wife

who is carrying the child

he left in her on leave

convinced he won’t die here

desperate to receive

letters in answer to all his,

read by a censor in San Francisco

then re-routed again so far

to Ballarat, Victoria, Australia

where he’d gone on R&R.

Up the beach a soldier waves.

Fisherman drops rod and runs

thrashes Jeep along muddy tracks

passing combat-weary men

playing cards, cleaning guns

who hoot to see the mail-grin

of a Captain dressed as on the day

he was born, in Brooklyn.

The Corporal holds a batch.

Nude hurries to duckboarded tent

table and chair he’s making

from scavenged pallet wood

when he and his don’t have to go

wading swamps to pinpoint

men awaiting letters from Tokyo.

He reads his swelling bride.

Months back he wrote his dreams

of having her every imaginable way

one such, “in a Jap pillbox, they

only lock from the inside!”

(the censor let that info go).

He doesn’t see his daughter

until she’s nearly one.

Postwar, Long Island, NY,

they produce another, and a son.

H&S Battery, 4th Btn, 11th Marines

and Pacific islands slaughter

now fade to typical scenes

of late-started domestic life:

he gets a job, rents a house,

buys himself a car, a Riley,

goes dancing with his sexy wife.

His letters were stored in a trunk

hers disappeared after the war.

I know she once posted him a cake

to Guadalcanal (and it got there!)

that he sang beautifully. Little more.

The typing has been a son’s fishing.

When she lifted the phone that night

her captain was 37, I was four.

After Guadalcanal, where he got a Purple Heart, malaria, and complained that his hair was falling out, Capt. Robert Austin Usher and family returned from New York to Australia, where he had a job. He was killed instantly when a car in which he was a passenger crashed into the back of a timber truck in Western Australia on July 4, 1950, Independence Day.

Words

Leap without thinking

to the icefloe page

black rats at that stage

when the ship is sinking.

Logic’s flotsam to claw

any reason they can get

each one a Crusoe yet

seeking inhabited shore.

See how they run together

a brook in full babble

pointscoring as in Scrabble

as trustworthy as weather.

As rats will stop to preen

curl to sleep in sewer nest

words are often at their best

in the silences between.

Rod Usher