How do you come home, JD, from

horror and become a 1940’s preppy when

you’ve walked among crisp,

contorted bodies stacked one

 

on another and then, once in a

while a haunting, disturbing

whimper emerges, not from the young

twenty-something American

 

sergeant, but from the stacks

of corpses and then jumping

into the lake with the kids,

college, parties and decisions

 

about majors and minors and

careers. Really? How do you

stay out of the psych ward or

how do you get out of the

 

bunker – by hunkering down

yourself and writing, writing,

writing about innocence pro-

tected so you can get out of

 

the bunker of rage at the shall-

owness, superficiality, which

always end in brutality, carnage

and stacks of burned bodies from

 

which there is a whimper, and

always a whimper from a young

woman/girl, almost too young

 girl, innocent along the beach

 

or in her dorm room. In his

bunker he remained Peter Pan,

the Lost Boy, betrayed over and

over by a too wifely Wendy

 

until he met the au pair, some-

one to care for a scared, little

boy who never grew up

even at the time of his death at 91.