David Cheezem



Difficult Snow

I am walking in difficult snow,
my boots gnawing the white

ground, and everything I know
is here. The alders, shivering,

are here, and the memory of devil's
club stinging last summer

is here. I am alone,
but Joseph Stalin is talking to me.

He is saying, "Why sad?"
and I tell him: I am

trying to write a good poem
about terrible things,

and I can't seem to find
a place in the language.

And Joseph Stalin laughs,
wraps the wool-clad arm around

my shoulder, and says,
"Ahhh, David, why make things

so difficult. All I have to do is speak,
and twenty thousand people

become my imagination,
and I don't see them any more."

The alders shiver;
the trail disappears.

I am walking in difficult snow
and I am alone,

but everything I know is here.

---

Lilly's letter to me -- 2

We have all been told that soil is born
in the slow motion heat of worms
digesting hair, meat, bone, leaves,

but if it could happen before your eyes?
if you could see soil born in an instant,
coming to fruit, wouldn't you want
to hold it, to roll this breathing soil
through your fingers, and watch
the new clumps fall to the old earth?

Marty's ex-girlfriend Joan had the fastest
compost pile in the whole world.
If she dropped a slimy leaf of Swiss chard
onto the pile, she could watch it dissolve,
but she should have told him not to reach
his hand too soon into the fast, new earth.

She should have told him how the heated borders
between soil-notsoil crumble during
the time of transformation, how the new
soil asks to join whatever it touches.

He touched it too soon, feeling first
the soil soften in his fingers, then
the fingers softening in the soil.

Now, baby's breath is all that holds
the clumps of his palms together; bleeding
hearts contain his fingers, fragile
lobelias, contain his wrists. It's very

sad to him. He's very sensitive
about all this. I am too,

but he feels so soft upon me --
his scented hands on my skin. Sometimes
I fail: sometimes I lose my grief for him,
and whisper guilty gratitude to Joan
or to his moist, fragile hands, or to
the soft, sad blues his fingers sing.

---

On hearing the first rumors of Pol Pot's death

Pol Pot is dead, or rumored dead:
We do not know. I want to take care to speak
only what I know. I may know heat,
but I don't know Cambodian heat.
I have played with sand on the beach
in Florida, buried my friends in it, but then
dug them out again. I have seen
one dead man. Drowned. I was five years old.

I do not know Cambodian death,
and though I am tempted to say,
"To know is to die," that would be too easy.
Cambodian death was difficult. I know
the images: skulls stacked in rooms,
files stuffed with head and shoulder
portraits, parodies of passport photos.

(Those were the clean executions.
Other times they saved their bullets,
beat whole families to death.
I have read this: one boy, now a man,
came to: His family, bodies. He
saw his sister's hand first, blurred by his
own cracked vision. Then he slipped away.)

When I think of death in Cambodia, I think
of death like sand and death like water: the death
numbered in bodies, and the singular death
of memory, but what do I know? That man
did not speak of "death-like-sand," and he
did not say, "parodies of passport photos" either.
When Nixon bombed Cambodia, I listened

to Jeff Beck playing guitar, one speaker
on each side of my bed. It was loud and
uncomfortable. By the time Pol Pot charged
Phnom Penn, I was 17, and wanted
to join a commune in Tennessee.
Pol Pot was a hero. He was going to solve

everything, take us back to the land,
bring us back to nature. I celebrated it, like
Nazi youth in Germany, because I thought I knew,
could know the world from that Florida beach.
Now I know less, and now I know better:
Pol Pot is not dead, or only perhaps dead.

That is what I know.

David Cheezem quit teaching high school in Houston, Texas, three years ago and moved to Alaska. He is now a graduate student in the University of Alaska Anchorage creative writing department.