Night after night the photos of dead soldiers
go by on the News Hour like playing cards while we drink
our wine, though we stop for that length of time, of course,
out of reverence, but it’s not enough. The well of
how-not-enough-it-is is bottomless, deeper than TV. Even
if you track back through the Comcast cable, back to
the electrical impulses, you’re not even close to what to do.
Not even if you end up on Main Street in Sallisaw, Oklahoma,
and follow the nineteen-year-old into the storefront full of
uniforms, crisp, medallioned, follow not his vanity
but his hope, his longing for order, for the squared shoulders
of order, his wish for the vast plains of the world
to unroll at eye-level, so he can walk out into the particulars,
the screaming, the blood. Owen, Brooke, Sassoon: what
anthem for the doomed youth this time? His death rests
like a quarter in the pocket, a sure thing. Its arrival
is a few missing lines I fill in, wrongly, because
the mind does that: I have him watching in slow motion,
with love and pity, the flowers beginning to bloom
on his shirt, the sky closing like a book. Sadly, then,
he disappears entirely into my mind, his last breath
easing between my words. There was a book in his childhood.
No, mine. Ducks cross the road, a mother duck leads them
through traffic to the pond. The pages flip so that
the ducks seem to move. They slide into the pond
with the satisfaction of making it through the human
confusion. Our soldier floats like a duck. Like a night-flight
casket. In the photo his eyes, straightforward, being all
they can be, float on the surface of a pool of uncataloged
genetic material. One snapshot in time, his eyes were
like that, his mouth. He can’t remember. He never was
like that. He was playing dress-up, then, hoping to make it true,
and did, so true no one could get in a word, in protest.