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Barry’s roadster pressing vapors and clouds, foggier and doggier. Silver stanchions lamp-lit the stage. Coronas, dreamy signs billboards— The Arch bathed in blue light. Hearing your voice out of the fog, I wish I tasted your eggnog laced with whiskey, long sips…

On the sunny afternoon of 8 August 1970, a courier dropped the daily casualty report on my desk. The day prior, Charlie Company had been investigating a suspicious area in the bush. Capt. Martinez, who inclined toward the unusual, had set up an LP (listening post) away from the main body. An LP was the least popular assignment and most unsettling because the enemy owned the night.   Two of the newest men in the unit, an FNG (fucking new guy) and SP4 Pondextuer Eugene Williams, a vet from The Big Red One, were put out there in no man’s land like tethered goats, to pick up enemy traffic. They were huddled around their radio listening to the night noises for tell-tale signs when a Viet Cong snuck up and planted a mine. The blast took off Williams' head and critically wounded his companion. Doc Gerrits went out to check. Williams was done for, so he treated the wounded man.   Taking care of your buddies is utmost, but Williams’ friends were shaky because of recent enemy contac...

While stumbling around the Internet today I ran across "Refusal to Bury." It brought back a lot of memories because I am the  Ron  Martz cited in the piece. When that story was dropped in my lap I was in my second month of my first newspaper job after dropping out of college after two years. The story resonated with me because I had spent three years in the Marine Corps prior to college (1965-68), the last 18 months working in the Casualty Section at Headquarters Marine Corps (they sent me there because I could write a simple declarative sentence and type with all 10 fingers; an oddity in the Marine Corps at the time). I remember the day Mrs. Campbell walked into the newspaper office and told her story first to Dick Lundin, who was a part-time correspondent for us who wrote about community affairs in Port St. Lucie, Fla., a planned community just south of Fort Pierce. He wrote the first piece about it and then the story was handed to me, in part because of my militar...

Amidst old smoke and stale perfume of a broken night, a seraphic voice posed a question in the dark— to tremble to hear a moan to sink into unguent warmth in a sacred retreat. In the green room, yellow gloves lay on a coffee table. She lit a cigarette and gazed at the fine rain I took her scent and felt her breath her nostrils flared an arabesque veil of smoke drifted into cloudy gray-green eyes. “Have we spoken?” A hot blush came to my cheek. “Your blood is warm.” “I read Bishop Sheen.” She forced a laugh and blew a jet  from under dark lashes. “I adore Coblenz. Kiss me. ”   She tasted of tobacco and stale mint. I slid fingers to her nipples her bosom swelled a tremor crossed her face. “Would you like a trip to Greece?” That’s where I want to go: White-velvet breasts C-section painted nails, on a cold-hard floor. I woke to a curving figure  in a wide-brimmed hat staring in a mirror, black-spike heels, cigarette, eye-liner, headlights in the drive shouts at the front door...

Pythia arose from The Education of a Young Gentleman , a nonfiction short story which tells of the late-night encounter between a 19-year-old boy and a 29-year-old married woman in a highly charged sexual atmosphere. She is fixed and unattainable at the conclusion of the poem, like the characters on Keats Grecian urn. Pythia says something about the strange magic of the woman and the encounter; the fusing of the mythological and the personal.  I tried to distill feeling, emotion, what it is to be alive, and moments in life, in order to create an alternative world.   My style tends to be sardonic. My words tend to be on the definite side, they don't caress each other. A w ord carves out a specific cultural niche. Reading a poem allows you to enter that world and those niches, albeit not always what the writer has in mind.  My first sense of literature was from the 19 th century writers. My introduction into culture and politics was high school Latin.  Pythia owes...

WHY I LIKE IT: Poetry editor Hezekiah writes… Pythia is a short, epic, poetic quest for two, not to be missed. Charles Jacobson is promethean in this intimate, imagistic, incidental encounter-conquest. Who’s the muse who writes his stuff?—I goda get in touch. “…to sink into unguent warmth” “ I took her scent and felt her breath.” And maybe the best line, “An arabesque veil of smoke drifted into cloudy gray-green eyes.” I was riveted by his words and the amplitude of the scene as it transcends to the divine and lapses back to the banal.(Spacing and font size are poet’s own) HS Senior editor Charles writes: What you are about to read is consummate poetry by a consummate literary artist. Just as mesmerizing as ‘Pythia’ are the author’s extensive notes and footnotes. Once settled on the page,, he is both sculptor and archeologist. Exquisite word choice and rarefied technique put this poem in a class by itself. Five stars.   Pythia...

What am I doin' here? Please Mr. Custer, I don't want to go —from De Lory, A., Darian, F. and Van Winkle, J. (1960). Mr. Custer [lyrics] Early February, 1970, Charlie company was hacking through thick bamboo over our heads, deep in the stomping grounds of the 9th Division NVA (North Vietnamese Army), investigating some funny business the Duck had spotted in a locality we were unfamiliar with. Back in the world, Jean Dixon, the gossip prophet, had marked our regiment (Custer’s 7th Cavalry) for destruction. If that wasn’t enough, the anniversary of the Tet Offensive was also hanging over our heads. Late that afternoon, the point stopped chopping; I almost crashed into Bob. Something piqued the man’s interest—a fresh path. Mmm-hmm. Intuition is a funny thing. When you get that flash, “something isn’t right here,” you’d better listen. Normally, we didn't touch paths, follow one, or cross one. Better to break bush than mix with heavy traffic and ignorant crowds. Patient, soft-...