Parade Rest By Robin Carstensen

One potato had fed three brothers and her some nights D-Day sirens raided their dreams.  Deutschland rebuilt itself in months, trusting authorities still, efficiency more. Mother was an expert quilt-maker artfully guiding each stitch. She was your father’s liebchen, You could not learn her patience for sewing—how to follow her lithe hands, some days hard, ascetic strokes.

Father, young lieutenant, waded through rice paddies in Tam Quan, saw his commander’s head blown off.  The head of a good man with a compass and convictions.  A family in his pocket gleaming from photos of amber grain and honey. Shell shocked, father stepped up, dragged the men through the rivers, and from hills and bowels, jumped from planes at nine thousand feet.

Rhineland and Airborne Rangers held the reins to survival and following the rules, you might not die. And break the rules to see another day. What could you hear above their voices, ricocheting through the house and all your minor indiscretions. Your skin standing at full attention when they called your name, every pore open, follicles quivering on edge, never quite at parade rest.

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Mother’s Hummel figurines going about their quiet pastoral duties, you, at 16, tearing out past curfew, over barbed wire fence knotted taut around the red two-story brick quarters lined up like infantry guarding Fort Monmouth, New Jersey under the gaping moon, you, a silent howl in summer’s gorged heat following a young corporal’s scent, the long run and reconnaissance

beneath his glistening innocence and yours clamping down in the wet-slick thickening night, mysterious terrains, hands and mouths fluttering like doves and silk scarves, your body a ribbon floating home at dawn back over barbed wire, slipping into the barrack-attic, avoiding each floorboard creak up the narrow steps to your room. What did you know of the guards at the gates

checking for insurgents, your narrow escape from the court martial in the House of the Field Artillery Airborne Ranger Mother and Father, who climbed up from the forests of Giessen, Germany, from North Dakota, from Vietnam and Kansas, through brimstone and fire, again and again, their arms full of men and approval, women, children, quilts, and hand grenades.