Tom Whalen

Considering My Glass Eye

Were these the suburbs of the city or the city itself
I saw a man on a cliff looking at the moon
a strange calm came over me
I left off my reading to watch
the upturned milk cans spill out into the snow
I saw myself lying on the battlefield
the solution must set the standard for simplicity
one night on Schlossplatz I felt a lunar joy
my memory perfect, but that
didn’t tell me what I wanted to know
the passengers on the U9 tram,
the mystery of the two doors that plagued children
through the long winter in their night beds,
left feverish one moment, trembling in terror the next
es ist allgemein bekannt
an old watch crossed by a snail in moonlight
there was a perturbation in the air, after which
red ants stormed out of the heart of a doll
my glass eye a radiance
an almost automatic invention
the sad moon, the castle, the lake, the shepherd’s staff
it is eternal winter within
bold little beauty
in which much is embedded
in whose depth swallows stitch up the night
that’s when the funeral began
and a man put on his trousers
the hallway was semi-dark
your father asked me to marry him
I told you I love you, which you could never believe
despair swirled in the wings
in the cabinet of dreams a washtub of ashes

Dodging the Draft

Little Rock, Arkansas 1970

I dodged the draft by various means,
fasting, among them, but basically I failed
my intelligence test, a skill acquired
from reading counseling psychology
to a blind man, whose son flew bombers
over Vietnam. In one eye I, too,
am legally blind and had the papers
to prove it. “I don’t see anything,”
said the examiner when he shone
a bright light into the eye. Still,
they classified me 1-Y. On the bus
back, others were weeping, but not I
nor the paranoid schizophrenic
4-F poet I knew, later a suicide.
As was Ernie, a childhood friend
who served in Vietnam. The year
before he died, we shotgunned dope together.
He had seen a friend along the Mekong —
“Hey, Fuselier,” Ernie said.
“Hey, Castille,” Fuselier said. —
swift boats headed in opposite directions.

Tom Whalen’s books include Elongated Figures, Winter Coat, The President in Her Towers, and two translations of short prose by Robert Walser, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories and Little Snow Landscape (NYRB Classics). His poetry and prose have appeared in Agni, Georgia Review, The Hopkins Review, Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Missouri Review, Rhino, The Southern Review and other journals.