Sample Poems by Palmer Hall
The Marine Sulfur Queen
For my father: lost at sea, February, 1963
A T-2 tanker bound from Port Arthur to Norfolk
carrying burning yellow stench around the Florida keys—
Molten sulfur—hot, burning, smelling of rotten
eggs pent up in close quarters. My father's ship.
This was no operation of divine love,
no task done for merit or any kind of joy,
no fight with nature or God, no big fish,
no trip to find and kill a mythic whale.
He substituted, needing money, on that one last voyage.
When the first mate called in sick the night before,
my father eager for work, said yes, though he doubted
the ship long before I carried his bags aboard.
Four weeks out from port and two days
late to dock, the Coast Guard began its search:
no distress call, no oil slicks, no life preservers,
no sign of a ship large enough to hold 37 men and
a thousand tons of bubbling sulfur. They said
“No ship that large can vanish, all unmarked.”
They said, “Maybe the Cubans came and steered
the ship away. Maybe they're in Havana.”
But they weren't in Havana and there were no signs.
They said, “Sometimes a giant wave rises up in the sea,
washes over ships, rolls them, capsizes them,
but they always leave traces behind: an oil slick or
something more, wreckage, bodies, some kind
of debris.” But there was no debris and there were
no bodies. Only warm water in the Gulf of Mexico
and the cooler waters of the Atlantic, calm, unruffled.
The Voyage
February, 1963
El mapa es al viaje lo que el mito es al lenguaje.
—Alberto Blanca
A map is to a journey what a myth is to language.
—tr. HPH
Before the assassinations, dark waters brushed
against creosote pilings and the gray husk
of a T-2 tanker rocked with every rainbow wave.
Inside fires sparked and languished, yellow sulfur
packed tight, compressed, liquefied, so still, hush,
brown water, slick, sparkling rainbows on the hull.
Check the charts: pulled through miles of shallow water,
deep channels, dredged daily to the color blue: deep
drop off, flowing warm river in salt water. Here predators
swim, flanks iridescent, shiny: mackerel, tuna, marlin,
tarpon, swordfish, shark, all that array of fighting fish.
The tanker’s props turn, push it around the Florida keys.
Here the chart speaks truth, escapes from myth, leads
travelers into clear water until something happens, some
thing transcends what is drawn on paper, on screens,
ink and electrons, pulling, mist-covered in angry squalls,
the road breaking, turning in on itself, charts washed away
as the tanker rocks, twists in the winds and rains, snaps
like a toy boat in a pond, nothing else, a voyage begun,
ended in warm waters, somewhere near Cuba, no place
on the map to mark the X, no oil slick, only a story.
From the Periphery
1.
Spotlights shine out a hundred feet
or more, show tufts of green where grass
plowed under, struggles, shoots up.
I whisper to Claymores, 50 calibers
M-60s, hold the dead weight of an M-79
listen to the sounds of water buffalo and
of a distant firefight.
In that dark men I have not really
come to know wait quietly, barely breathe
in fear that someone else will hear their breath,
hunker down, eyes barely open, listen
to their hearts beat, to night sounds
grown suddenly quiet.
The singsong cries of hootchmaids
bring me back from a place I will never go
and only, so far down inside, almost
convince myself to regret never having been.
2.
One morning in Dak To, I saw four men
who had been five, LRRPs, kicking dirt
into the sky, eyes focused straight ahead,
silent, wrung dry in the hot sun.
Sometimes commerce can not exist. Language
can not always be enough, words can not
translate what eyes have seen.
Thoughts lie fallow, spears of grass
that cannot push up or out.
This, then, is what war must be: a walk
in the night, heart held in the hands of those
who walk beside you, breath held in each
other's mouths, smell shared in such a way
that all scents are one, touch only
a light pressure, hand on shoulder,
eyes searching for movement in the dark.
TRO
(TRO: Failed Basic—Training Required Over)
You simply weren't cut out for it, snot nose
in the snow, shirt flopping out, entrenching
tool back inside the barracks as we stood
listening to the dogs bark. The SDI, in
your face, yelped, and sent us all, tails
between our legs back up three flights
to help you dress again, load your pack,
clean your M-14, wipe dried muck from your face.
Eight weeks later, we left for advanced schools
and Vietnam. You stayed, TRO, a second time,
lived another cycle, joined another platoon, waited
for spring in the Ozarks. I have always wondered
why those of us so smart went and you remained
and, if, deep down inside, you laughed
Ghost Lights
A still breath on the summer breeze
and high hills in Dak To loom
over us. No quick answers ever
spring to mind, no drops of peace,
not even less than slow, perhaps,
now, inertia, a gradual “settling in.”
We no longer even move our lips to ask
or, if we do, old slogans drop from voices
that always have an answer and never find
a truth, just wriggling obfuscations and
something like the Marfa lights dancing
at the dark ends of ancient tunnels.
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