Portrait From The Infantry

A poem by Alan Dugan

He smelled bad and was red-eyed with the miseries

of being scared while sleepless when he said

this: “I want a private woman, peace and quiet,

and some green stuff in my pocket. Fuck

the rest.” Pity the underwear and socks,

long burnt, of an accomplished murderer,

oh God, of germans and replacements, who

refused three stripes to keep his B.A.R.,

who fought, fought not to fight some days

like any good small businessman of war,

and dug more holes than an outside dog

to modify some Freudian’s thesis: “No

man can stand three hundred days

of fear of mutilation and death.” What he

theorized was a joke: “To keep a tight

asshole, dry socks and a you-deep hole

with you at all times.” Afterwards,

met in a sports shirt with a round wife, he was

the clean slave of a daughter, a power brake

and beer. To me, he seemed diminished

in his dream, or else enlarged, who knows?,

by its accomplishment: personal life

wrung from mass issues in a bloody time

and lived out hiddenly. Aside from sound

baseball talk, his only interesting remark

was, in pointing to his wife’s belly, “If

he comes out left foot first” (the way

you Forward March!), “I am going to stuff

him back up.” “Isn’t he awful?” she said.

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Poems in English 

• La Nue by Alan Seeger
• Kyrenaikos by Alan Seeger
• Juvenilia An Ode To Natural Beauty by Alan Seeger
• I Loved by Alan Seeger
• I Have A Rendezvous With Death by Alan Seeger
• Fragments by Alan Seeger
• Eudaemon by Alan Seeger
• El Extraviado by Alan Seeger
• Do You Remember Once by Alan Seeger
• Coucy by Alan Seeger
• Champagne 1914 15 by Alan Seeger
• Broceliande by Alan Seeger
• Bellinglise by Alan Seeger
• At The Tomb Of Napoleon by Alan Seeger
• Ariosto Orlando Furioso Canto X 91 99 by Alan Seeger
• Antinous by Alan Seeger
• An Ode To Antares by Alan Seeger
• All Thats Not Love by Alan Seeger
• After An Epigram Of Clement Marot by Alan Seeger
• A Message To America by Alan Seeger

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