12

The polish on my father's shoes
looked back at me, black and bright
each night when he would slip them off,
unbuttoning his dress blue shirt,
the silver oak leaf shining on his shoulders.
I held my nose to tease him -
the smell of his big feet, his high, thin socks -
knowing he would only smile so long,
knowing when I had to quit my yowling.

At picnics, at the club, at Bunco tables
the military men and their wives
sipped Rhine wines and threw back lagers
and they laughed while I with all the other brats
ran exiled into parking lots,
or back rooms, from whose doorways
I would watch and listen
to those military men. See the way
their big hands rose and fell,
their broad and heavy shoulders back,
hear the words that I'd be spanked for saying.

Those men looked much the same, if grayer,
when my job took me to meet them
in their next careers:
I the pseudo journalist, pretty, quick,
my handshake strong,
my hand so small theirs could envelop it.
I became their darling,
these men I didn't know but did,
for whom I was demure and then
just crass enough to please them,
the men I knew to pull but never push.

When my father came up ill -
his sickness wrongly named
by a military man as stubborn as himself,
who he refused to question
as his feet went numb,  his body wasting
at the mercy of his brotherhood, his pride -
I learned then how to push, to stand steely
at attention, to command a doctor
as my father tried to raise himself
on one thin arm to glare at me for silence.

I've learned to break the protocol of military men,
to hold the eyes of the red-eyed veteran
at the bar who wears his scars like medals,
accusing us who cannot show him ours,
this military man who does not want
to charm me, or be charmed -
not by me. Shaved head. Black boots.