Morris Cove, Unalaska
“A woman behind each tree,”
the soldier joked
of feeling horny
at the sight of spruce, saplings
they planted around their huts
to relieve the erosion,
loneliness, a longing
interminable as the tundra.
Forty years later
a single stunted tree stands
out from concealment,
from a ravine picked with care
up the hillside. The banks
between it and the collapsed buildings
windbreaks, the camouflaging grasses
flattened by drifted snow.
Beyond the boundaries
of this camp, the historical
fact of courts-martial, I imagine
a man set apart by desire,
some chastened Whitman,
his only poem furtive, this
forearm and fist of a tree.