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
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