Another clear day; we finally got an inch or so of rain on Friday, which was much needed, and since then the temperature has cooled a little. This late in November, it finally feels like autumn. On my morning walk today, I was happy to see this handsome creature airing its wings in the sunshine. Our local turkey buzzards have been active lately. I’m fairly certain that the snag this one’s perched on is a green ash tree, clearly well-visited by woodpeckers.

My low mood seems to have abated, at least temporarily, and I wrote a few poems and revised a few others during the past three days. I’m trying to accept the fact that this year, we will see neither our son nor our daughter for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. So I’m trying to get creative about things to do that we might not have done if we were preparing for family celebrations. Yet we miss the concept of family celebrations. I guess that’s a socio-cultural thing, right? I may need to reassess what value “the holidays” have for me these days.

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I have also kept myself busy re-assessing a chapbook manuscript I’ve worked on forever (it seems) and am now looking for the sort of small, independent publisher that might consider a hybrid poetry-journalistic/historical work influenced by Muriel Rukeyser‘s long-poem The Book of the Dead. My poem is about a Korean War veteran tried as a traitor upon his return to the USA, a man who was my friend David Dunn’s father. It has been a real creative challenge to figure out how to tell his story, and the resulting text is definitely “hybrid,” with footnotes, magazine articles, military court proceedings, letters, and poems. People who believe that poems simply flow from some internal inspiration would probably take issue with a poem-ish thing like this, but I keep feeling compelled to find a way to tell this man’s story. The unfairness of it, the long-term damage, the people who used him as a scapegoat, his short life (he died at his mother’s, age 39, discouraged and unwell from physical wounds that never healed, divorced, unable to overcome the dishonorable discharge that kept him from gainful employment). David kept losing his father over and over: to prison, to PTSD, to divorce, to death. It’s an all-too-common narrative, but each tale is also deeply and profoundly individual. Hence the need to write it.