The Piper

No, he never led them far away,
willing as they were to follow
and not to go back.
The mountain never opened
to take them in.

Just over the mountain
he left them.

Having heard such music,
they believed,
they could never again be the children
of that sad town.

Somewhere ahead must lie,
they believed,
the joyous land from which he came.

But they did not believe
that they might find it without him.

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poem by Eric Torgersen
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Already Dead

A crackpot gringo in Guatemala told me:
when the pilots of the suicide planes began
their dives down at the ships they were already dead.
Coming from him, a smug didactic metaphor.
Remember Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz,' on Pearl?
The reason we found the final chorus so moving
is that when she shouts everybody! but no one joins in
and she goes on singing alone she's already dead.
When JFK took Marilyn Monroe in his arms,
each could tell that the other was already dead.
How they wept! It was love in a great tradition:
two corpses holding each other, crying if only
I could live for your sake o my beloved. They went
from that place bravely with deaths to finish for everyone.

poem by Eric Torgersen
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My Blindness

Once I woke up in the dark and thought I was blind. There was no light at all. There's always some light.

Blind, I was calm in that perfect dark. Friends would come, and I'd tell them what they had to do. It would be all right.

I'd go back home, but dignified, and I'd know my way perfectly in the house, even on the streets. I'd only been gone a few years.

I'd have them read me strange books, and they'd love my strangeness, thinking this is what it was, we knew there was something. They'd loved it a little already.

There at home in my great dark I'd find a single purpose, and begin.

But you know this: the light came.

Don't laugh at me. I live with so little blindness. Such a long way I've come. So little blindness.

poem by Eric Torgersen
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The Story Of White Man Leading Viet Cong Patrol

The Story of White Man Leading Viet Cong Patrol
-AP Dispatch, Des Moines Register, August 4, 1968

The slain enemy resembled
an American Marine
who was 18 years old
when he disappeared.

The violent episode
was one of the strangest
in this strange war.

*

For a moment
the two young men--
the American Marine
and the white man
in the uniform of the enemy--
stared at each other.

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poem by Eric Torgersen
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Yet

Hang him from a tree he hasn't hung from yet.
Fling him off a bridge no one's been flung from yet.

Send succor, in whatever dark disguise:
a hornet's nest he's not gone running, stung, from yet.

Early fall, and not one branch the wind
has not stripped every leaf that clung from yet.

Recess. Winter. Second or third grade.
A frozen pipe he hasn't freed his tongue from yet.

The drought seems endless. Spring. No dropp of rain.
Just parched soil no shoot has sprung from yet.

Find it in some corner of the workshop,
some damp rag no last dropp has been wrung from yet?

Probe the dank recesses of the cellar-
not one cask he hasn't yanked the bung from yet.

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poem by Eric Torgersen
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I've Come to be One who Cries

I've come to be one who cries when the plane the guys built in shop class on the TV
news is going to fly and everyone's there, parents, little kids, the teachers not even
dressed up, the mayor and the principal making speeches, the shop teacher saying
these are real fine boys, the guys standing around saying it's gonna crash, putting
their arms around girls and the teachers don't stop them, the band playing the school
song while the pilot gets in and checks everything out like you're supposed to, finally
kicks it over and taxies to the end of the runway with a drum roll and everybody
screaming already, and it goes off the line like a dragster and takes off! The band
starts 'Off we go, into the wild blue yonder' and the guys are slapping five and grabbing
girls and telling each other it flies! that piece of shit flies!

poem by Eric Torgersen
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Back

Keep the tale, it's free, just bring the book back.
Eat the fish, but bring the line and hook back.

No one out here lives by bread alone;
relish the coq au vin, but send the cook back.

Don't let a warning chill your lovely days,
just lock the door, please. Don't invite the crook back.

Accept this praise for a game well played, my friend-
and checkmate. Much too late to move that rook back.

What makes you so sure your puny dam
could hold even this innocuous little brook back?

Sure, you were young, and clueless, and unnerved.
Too late to win the dear one you forsook back.

A day will come when you'll be held to account
for every gift you gave and then took back.

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Open Stage Poetry Reading

After the one that sings, and after the one
that can make up poems of a kind right on the spot;
after a girl who didn't . . . walk very well,
took five minutes to get from her seat to the stage
then read one poem with hardly any words in it
and halted the whole way back in a staggering silence;
after the bald one's rhymes about this teeth;
a woman got up whose poems won't write down,
it's all in the way the voices in her come out.

We went to a medium once, and a woman locked
in a trance let a dead man come inside her and talk.
She held herself like . . . a woman being a man.
That's what it was at the open stage poetry reading,
and I left without talking, I hadn't come expecting it.
What could I have told her, I think it's a dead man?
It wasn't something I wanted to get that close to.
I could never do it myself, let a dead man come in-
or would it be, into me, a dead woman that would come?

poem by Eric Torgersen
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Holy

Whitman felt his ribs and found the fat holy.
Poor mad Smart found Geoffrey the cat holy.

Growing up on Yankee turf I found
a Mickey Mantle Louisville Slugger bat holy.

A grown man now, I do confess to finding
one pose you strike on your new blue yoga mat holy.

I have not one objection to your calling
the old man in the robe and pointy hat holy.

No reason, if it helps you stalk the tiger,
not to call its trim and pungent scat holy.

Would you please shut that squalling monster up
(although in theory I find the little brat holy)?

I still recall how Allen lightened up
the crowd at the reading by saying, "It's not all that holy."

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Locked

Children tattooed, pierced and studded, dreadlocked;
parents panicked, indecisive, deadlocked.

Mother to daughter: live as you must, if you must;
for just a bit longer, keep the door to your bed locked.

Son to father: teach me what you know,
but I won't agree to keep the door to my head locked.

Mother to father: where have you been, and where
have you kept your thoughts and all you might have said locked?

They'd come so far, and then she saw, in him,
the door to their life, their home, their daily bread locked.

One night in a fiery panic dream he ran
and found the door toward which he'd wildly fled locked.

Aging, but at long last ripe and ready,
she found the on-ramp to the road ahead locked.

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poem by Eric Torgersen
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