My Father’s Helmet
You want to empty a heart
like some men discharge a gun?
Have someone you love die—
or go off to war.
I have seen my father go off to war
a hundred times a day in his head.
It is his way of dying
without really leaving.
Last night I dreamed
a sadhu took soldiers
coming home from battle
to sit in meadows.
There, he instructed them
to draw pictures of deer.
I see my father, a young man
on a hill bent over a pencil.
The soft lines of prairie grass
sketch around him.
His brow is furrowed.
He is trying so hard
but only makes straight, harsh lines,
cannot find the curve
of its haunches,
the flow of its neck.
Must he fail, too at this?
He sees the feral hooves
skip and bend,
the white tail flutter
like the hair of his seven daughters
in the wind.
Standing nearby,
the holy man
closes his eyes,
his robes billow and fall
in the grass.
He is silent.
My father presses
with a rigid stroke,
brings it to a point.
Again. Again. Again.
Why have curved lines
left the memory of my heart?
he screams.
Flashback:
he is making rows
of marks standing at attention
in his helmet,
counting by fives
the number of bodies taken down.
How much closer did
those lines get him toward home?
In childhood
he remembers
being tucked in
like something mattered.
Peering through
blanket holes
he would watch the moon
and trace its contour
with his finger.
What is in this deer
before war, he knew
in himself.
The Buddha preached
his first sermon to deer,
turning the wheel of dharma.
Take the wound
to beauty,
the man on the hill
with the gathered robes says.
My father draws.
The lines are a wheel,
a moon,
a helmet,
a deer.
The lines strain to move
through and into him,
rising like syllables
lost on the battlefield.
