There are many selves
to choke an instant
even when sober words
tell a lie in lasting form.
I give you the longing to use a bayonet, rise out of winnowing lanes of
air-rush sent by 88's
on a meadow where many were missed, not dead
but waiting to speak from their fright.
I joke of a bugler lying in a manger, old child who had just contracted
the syph
and who pouted for us his odd assumption
of delight in debauchery. I tell you we'd have killed kine who came to
worship
before we slaughtered men, for we were hungry. Sicily smelled of ordure
that is fertile
and there were unexpected, pure mountain streams. But a sniper never got
you, Gilligan:
I hope you were cured from your living chancre, wafer-shaped.
Awake in the corners of railroad lines angled to buildings
and g ing from odd room to room in old buildings
but made like a dream set: some day is like waking, walking one's own
house strangely
as if there were no waking from a drunk and the lightening hour was
midnight and the solid house
adobe
that crumbled in my thought. My child's life is most real
in the pain of his funeral. Cover over all the sense of his weight, sense
of his touch, any useless word of
comfort
not to be heard.
Well I think of something else when I am supposed to be happy? What
praise can I trust
more than words, passed with his life, of an old friend?
Imagined spaces
of the dead, in one's life
leave one moving
through a whole, but arid freedom.
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