Heirloom Photograph.

McGuire, Thomas G.

 Heirloom Photograph
 If you are interested in scars I can show you some very interesting
ones but I would rather tell you about grasshoppers.
--Nick Adams in "A Way You'll Never Be"
   1.
   In a reprint of a photo posted on my laptop screen
   struts my grandpa, a raw recruit just sixteen.
   Note how he stands smart and stract
   in a uniform stylish yet oversized
   and by the ladies prized
   (despite its common medium-brown drabness).
   See how he smiles shouldering the gravid rucksack
   that he'll bear across the Western Front
   from Belleau Wood to St. Mihiel.
   It's the jaw, though, that always numbs
   my nuts--see how it juts
   as if to say to the demon Hun,
   "Bring it on Gerry boy, I dare your sorry ass."
   2.
   Later in the labyrinth
   of the trenches he'll
   shed the rucksack
   from his back
   as he runs & pronks
   about the redoubt
   dodging minatory
   five-nines & corpses
   bloating in the sun,
   hopping like
   a hunted hopper
   who somehow
   always scores
   some shade.
   Oh lucky hopper
   slips his ass
   just beyond the reach
   of Mower's lethal blade,
   a sickle mowing
   so much hay.
   3.
   But the photo doesn't show his fright--
   that's the face of battle that almost always gets forgotten,
   the oh-shit face that says he's crapped his knickers
   as he carts dead-end dispatches day & night
   from colonel to captain, then back again.
   In the photo he just smiles smiles smiles.
   Should fresh recruits look otherwise?
   What good's a greenhorn grunt who foresees his own demise?
   4.
   Absent from the photo too is grandpa's brother,
   age fifteen, a courier who wears the same
   drab uniform, the usual medium-brown affair.
   But for the dogtag stats stamped upon the rim
   of a few paltry medals awarded postmortem
   (760599 PTE E.T. Taggart)
   I know next to nothing of this phantom kin.
   I want grandpa's and his brother's rest
   to be more than silence though
   so I'll sing their song of suffering:
   One day as gramps trailed
   his brother he blinked not once but twice
   as a five-nine fragment sliced
   clean through parapets & gunny sacks.
   Until gramps died from the disease called slow suicide,
   the curse of working men & gutted soldiers,
   a pyrotechnic trauma show of haywire synapses fired
   near every night in the minefield of his neuralpaths.
   * * *
   Here's the nightly horror show he saw
   till his liver finally caved
   like a fish rotting in the head:
   first a flame-red flash
   quickens the retina
   as a smooth shrapnel
   axe scythes all
   within its path;
   then a white-hot
   fragment crops
   the shaved carrot top
   of little brother's
   patriotic head--
   and of a sudden
   little Edmund
   sweet, sweet Edmund
   is oh so dead.
   And in that vision smooth and clean
   as a mower glides through long grass green--
   a nightly deja vu of a shrapnel blade that felled for good
   sweet Edmund in the mud of Belleau Wood--
   Grandpa's photogenic jutted jaw unhinged forever. 

THOMAS MOGUIRE is a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force. An Irish Studies and Seamus Heaney scholar, he is also poet and translator. His creative work has appeared in various journals, including North American Review, Poetry Revival Ireland, and WLA.