Life at War ( after Denise Levertov )

To compensate for my father’s  
muted choice, I turned to poetry—    
backpacks of word folded    
precisely as parachutes.    
 
Bullets from a magazine  
shell-shocked my faculties—    
ricocheted off the metal floor    
of a downed chopper in ‘Nam.    
  
Levertov referenced Rilke—    
formless lumps he carried about;    
the irony, or not    
referencing her raw dough:    
  
pebbles that plague memory    
decades after the same war:    
Rilke’s bitterness, Levertov’s weight    
both buried mines in my jungled-gut—    
  
no closer to percipience    
than decoding my father’s silence.      
~    
 
#DeniseLevertov