Kate Utt

Survival Training

Subic Bay Philippines, Naval Base 1962

She slumps in her eighth-grade chair
diagraming a sentence, so many dangling participles.
Far side of the manicured baseball field,
just beyond the school, a teeming jungle

steaming with life, dank humid air, scent
of decaying leaves. Pit viper’s flat triangular
head, tongue flits. Bat wings beat under the
verdant green canopy.

A question mark of a white silk
parachute catches her eye. Navy
pilot, a diagonal slice on a horizon
of biting trees. Survival training.

Massive troop carriers rumble
into port. Green locusts, soldiers’
swarm like ants, last leave before
Viet Nam.

She reads the next sentence, deconstructs,
stares down into a teeming valley, quicksand,
dangerous, endless.

Kate Utt is the daughter of a Navy Chief Petty Officer and moved nineteen times in eighteen years. After graduate school she settled in Northern California, where she made deep friendships and lived happily for fifty years. She recently moved to Portland, Oregon, to join a pro-active senior co-housing community. Kate discovered poetry through a Stanford Medical Center cancer recovery program. Writing has become central to her life. She is in a poetry reading group and two writing/critique groups.