Eric Torgersen Poems

In the kitchen window
the coleus I cut down to stumps
to make cuttings for friends
is spreading new leaves to the sun.
...

The Story of White Man Leading Viet Cong Patrol
-AP Dispatch, Des Moines Register, August 4, 1968

The slain enemy resembled
...

That was no language that was your life.
That was a punning linguist.
That was the headline Author Gets Off.
That was an offer of amnesty and amnesia,
...

After the one that sings, and after the one
that can make up poems of a kind right on the spot;
after a girl who didn't . . . walk very well,
took five minutes to get from her seat to the stage
...

Once I woke up in the dark and thought I was blind. There was no light at all. There's always some light.

Blind, I was calm in that perfect dark. Friends would come, and I'd tell them what they had to do. It would be all right.
...

You thrust into the coffin
where your young wife lay cold
and even more hauntingly beautiful
for the tragic manner of her death
...

Children tattooed, pierced and studded, dreadlocked;
parents panicked, indecisive, deadlocked.

Mother to daughter: live as you must, if you must;
for just a bit longer, keep the door to your bed locked.
...

When they draw us, the children,
as great beaming sun-faces
balanced on sticks, waving sticks,
can it be that they see us so soon
...

No, he never led them far away,
willing as they were to follow
and not to go back.
The mountain never opened
...

Thank God he's gone,
on his horse
of all colors-
...