It was past eleven
and again I watched
Tora! Tora! Tora! with pops
getting to own the couch
getting on eighty
getting annoying as hell
getting so I would do anything.
Pops was on the Arizona that Sunday
staggering in still drunker than shit
late but not AWOL
come over the gangway as the planes
roared across the harbor
dropping every sort of death
into sleeping men stacked deck on deck
snoring away the last
of peacetime Navy
We watched his tape. Again
he started with the stories
of that Sunday morning
about how
he tried to remove what he thought was a bloody bandage
from a screaming sailor's chest
and how he knew it was not a bandage
when the saw the torn tattoo of the Arizona
and how everyone else seemed dead anyway.
How he was really sixteen
when he enlisted
asked me how old I was again
and said again “Same age you are now, kid.”
It was the same every time
when he asked me
to hold his hand steady.
He was on a fixed income and it was a shame, he said,
to spill perfectly
good bourbon
on the couch.
This is great.