Breakers

Look, the ocean hides a screaming madness

but it looks so serene until the waves rise up

and break, until the storm opens it up

and the primal force lets loose 

its dazzling roar and crashing surf,

then leaves us a foamy edge of silence

to watch as it dissolves into another 

kind of light.

From: Shorts: Short Poems

On How We Ramble

Unpub. MS p. 66

For Now (The American Dream #5 of 5)

A Warning

The American Dream?

It is hope, an opportunity to dream

in terms of possibilities,

then the freedom to make it happen.

Sadly, border walls, bureaucratic bungling, 

evil people—vicious, self-righteous, and malevolent— 

disinterested in right and wrong;

the heart of society is torn out to line 

someone’s pockets, then walking away 

with blood on their hands, smugly believing 

they have done nothing wrong, 

done for the greater good.

The Donald T’s are destroying more 

civility and social order everyday.

A polarized society has blunted 

the pursuit of the American Dream, 

but for all its conflicting perceptions, 

for all its mythic assertions,

hope embodied in the Dream 

is indestructible, as hope always is, 

but Norman Rockwell and Donna Reed 

are now barely a glimmer.

From: Searching For Donna Reed,

Norman Rockwell, & The American Dream

Unpub. MS #5 of 5

Searching For Donna Reed (The American Dream #4)

This is a frustrating, maddening, and joyous

mixture of history, values, and imagery,

some true, some mythic, often irresistible.

It was America, in success and failure,

was it not, laughing and battered and crying,

who, in 1969, landed two men on the moon,

twelve years after the shock of Sputnik.

Yet, how many people and performers 

still entered venues and bathrooms

through specially marked doors?

While growing up we were influenced

by the various family sitcoms of the time,

wishing our family was like that TV family.

Of the many programs on 1950s television,

I couldn’t say if one was more true than another;

each had its charm, but the Donna Reed show

was emblematic for all the family sitcoms.

Sadly, excepting Amos n’ Andy, whiteness prevailed.

Looming was nuclear apocalypse, but what

did we understand about that?

It was of such monstrous proportions and 

destructive power too terrifying to imagine

that we just didn’t give it much thought.

My mother put two gallons of water and 

come crackers under the sink, just in case.

I asked her, Just in case of what?

After a month or so, she took it all out.

In the midst of this we loved and married. 

My wife and I graduated from college

and had great careers.

We raised two wonderful children,

owned a nice house on a quiet urban street.

The kids moved on as they were restless to do.

We got divorced; the world didn’t end.

Not exactly a Rockwell painting

or dreams unfulfilled.

We simply did the best we could

to make life worth living.

From: Searching For Donna Reed,

Norman Rockwell, & The American Dream

Unpub. MS #4 of 5

The American Dream? (#3)

Is it really something good and valuable

but obscured by all the turmoil?

More or less than a positive or a negative?

A friend reminded me that it is

Yes and No; Both and Neither.

We can rejoice in Norman Rockwell’s 

images of innocence and hope, but appalled 

by smashed tomatoes and federal marshals

escorting Ruby Bridges to her school.

We were ecstatic that Ed Sullivan brought

the Beatles to American television;

it was by watching American Bandstand

that I learned that The Big Bopper* was a white guy;

laughed at Gilligan’s preposterous island life.

Never was there a navy like McHale’s,

but who could be funnier than Tim Conway?

Never was there an alternate reality 

like that created by Rod Serling

for a twenty-three minute teleplay.

For many in my early boomer generation, 

this became a time of contradictions, 

ironies, and rapidly shifting paradigms; 

uplifting and depressing,

compassion competing with 

a chilling mockery of civility, 

but underneath it all,

hope endured.

* Jiles Perry Richardson, Jr.

(1930-1959)

From: Searching For Donna Reed,

Norman Rockwell, & The American Dream

Unpub. MS # 3 of 5

I Saw It On Television (The American Dream #2)

 At seventeen, though a hopeful young man,

I had no clue about living the American Dream.

I thought the American Dream was illusory. 

It existed in Disneyland, in the imaginations

of editors and magazine cover art,

in images of gender roles and success,

in the slogans of politicians,

the tough independence of the Marlboro Man;

Better living through Chemistry;

Progress is our most important product,

and twisted into other perverse advertising mantras.

There was something there I wanted

but I couldn’t explain what it was,

perhaps the desire for a secure future,

but the end of it all, of our collective innocence,

was when television showed the riots 

and bloodied heads; showed the Zapruder film

of President Kennedy’s assassination over and over; 

showed trampled dreams, 

bludgeoned civil rights, and the fiery-eyed 

youth in protest marches ready 

to dispense their own brand of assertiveness.

Mary Ann Vecchio became the symbol

of helplessness and anguish at Kent State,

and it put the Viet Nam War and body counts

into our living rooms and on our laps.

An entire way of life, however imagined,

was slaughtered before our very eyes,

exposing the hatred and violence 

of an America stirred from the bottom up,

exploding through the top.

From: Searching For Donna Reed,

Norman Rockwell, & The American Dream

Unpub. MS #2 of 5

From Where It Came (The American Dream #1)

I vaguely remember people

during the late 1950s to the early 1960s

talking about the American Dream,

usually on television,

sometimes teachers and neighbors,

or read in the Saturday Evening Post.

Norman Rockwell’s paintings reflected 

something of what people really did and believed,

from summer time, to holidays, to the Four Freedoms.

I wanted to be like those people in his paintings,

strong, happy, and contented—and also live 

the life of the Hardy Boys or Walter Mitty— 

until President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963

and Rockwell’s heartbreaking 1964 painting 

of six-year-old Ruby Bridges being escorted 

to school by federal marshals.

It was the terrible things 

people did to one another 

now made very public,

very present, that awakened so many.

It was nothing new for many Americans.

For them it was the same old bigotry, 

the same racism, the same meanness 

and violence they had lived with for generations.

And still people kept coming.

But being the fifteen-year-old kid that I was— 

white, middle class, naïve— 

I ignored the dissonance of nearly everything, 

yet I was vaguely ashamed, feeling like I lacked 

the courage of that six-year-old child.

From: Searching For Donna Reed,

Norman Rockwell, & The American Dream

Unpub. MS #1 of 5

Saying Goodbye

The best advice I was given

2012

Feel all meaning of your loss leaving

and watch it float away,

then what comes next will have

its own heave and grace.

Experience the full weight of your pain;

hear the music of the tragedy of your loss.

Throw out the protective layers 

of fear and excuses,

have the courage to cry and acknowledge

the loss and say, Goodbye.

Wallow not in your own mourning, rather ask,

How was my life enriched?

From: A Rambly Search for Innocence, Time, and Love

Unpub. MS p. 38