The enemy personified the nation. A fiction or series of fictions exploding through with smoke, pouring sweat. At the foot of a tree hands stuck in the dirt. Once in a while they hold on to me.
A couple of them seemed to be moving around the field, black-eyed, loose splinters from the neighborhood, full of wasted determination. He coughed it up on the pillow in a sort of puddle. The forms lying there, vacant, removed from there.
The house thin, blue, hanging in the air, transparent in the trees, the forms of the trees, no partition whichever way you move …
This man was weak, received a box from home, munching on a bloody cracker in the remaining hand. Two boatloads arriving, exposed to it anywhere, torches on the ground, rags around heads, hot at night with sudden energy, the maintaining skin of vengeance. Green oozing out from the grass—large spaces swept over—burning the dead beards, odor of the rejected arm and leg. In history the paper remain and still remain, soaking up the glaze …
I sit by his shining hair, the heart of the stranger. His ashy eyes, roasted in the morning. As you pass by, be on guard where you look. Opposite my window the freed horses are led off. The smoke streams upward, dark, thick, warm.
He said, “Make your own choice.” The kiss I gave him discharged better views.
The man is struggling for breath; a soldier’s life must be a bent thing. Others are arranged in a straight row. They have some old magazines I was in the habit of reading: theory, practice, democratic premises, superfluity. He was an ideal of his age in a few days. He kept a diary and wrote, “The doctors have been brave.”
I am taking care of a silent rebel, laid down on his arm to see its distribution, lying on the spot that time a hole in the air, his small calculations extruded. Meat might be named from mere demonism; nature and pretense were there.
I like to stand and look a long while. Individuals in human places verify the forms. The dim leaden members with heads leaning and voices speaking. In the arms and in the legs from my observation.
Dear Madame, I have seized the testimony, still alive. I do not know his past life, but feel as if it must have been good.
I saw circumstances, and can give you some fragmentary physiognomy and idioms …
Flesh of his breast and tremulous arms in the strain of a partial sleep, I have a special friend. Out of the shadowy scene the white beds, sat by a huddled form, shone in through the window a vacant moon …
Buttons … tufts of hair …
In bushes, low gullies, or on the sides of hills …
(1989)