One Winter Night in 1979

The night Big Jim flashed back to Vietnam,

We’d chased bar beers with shots of straight Jack Black,

‘Til five of us—all gone by then--remained.

We huddled round a table in the den,

And no one spoke for quite the longest time.

I looked at Jim to see if he was cool,

And saw instead a deadness in his eyes.

He reached across the table for the fifth,

Now empty, which explained the stupor-calm,

And grabbed it by its neck as if to choke

Last amber drops from out its drying void,

Then swung it down upon the table’s edge.

The shatter startled all of us alert,

As did the words Big Jim snarled out at us:

“I’m gonna cut you fucking V.C. pigs.”

And then he lunged, and then the chase began:

The four of us were out the nearest door

And in the freezing early morning air.

For some odd reason, I recall the stars

As seeming nearer than they’d ever seemed.

Then Big Jim screamed as Tracy’s cousin Lou

Axe-handled him down to the sodden grass,

The stars retreated up into the sky,

And we all lived, and Jim would live on, too,

To see his sons go slowly, surely blind,

Divorce his wife, a casualty of war,

And disappear into this poem’s lines,

As distant and as futile as those stars.