My father was a gunner on an LST
in the South Pacific.
I don't know which islands he patrolled--
they were below the equator.
He had photos of initiation rites
held on deck as they crossed zero latitude:
the old hand presiding dressed as Neptune,
wore coarse white hair made from a mop head,
blanket robes, held a trident, all the men were laughing,
sailed someplace where women
wore grass skirts, naked from the waist up,
my father said, men and women both had purple teeth
because they chewed betel nut.
One day a shipmate got his guts shot out:
tried to hold them in, it felt like he had to take a shit--
held his intestines in his hands, my father said,
and told the guys he had to take a shit.
My father didn't tell that story very often.
That's about all I remember.
But he never missed an episode of Victory at Sea,
we all watched with him on Sundays.
On the weekdays that he didn't go to work,
he put the LP record of Rimsky-Korsakov's
Scheherazade on the hi-fi:
let it play over and over;
drank beer, mostly, while the music swelled
honked an ooga horn on his jalopy,
my father jumped to his feet,
looked wildly around the living room,
he had no idea what to do.
