Owl in the elm. You can feel it. Listening a sieve no moving
thing slips through. Warm,
well-lit room. The window’s a mirror, behind which the city slackens,
softens; noise distinguished from noise but all shut
into shadow. There’s nowhere to go at this hour.
Like rafts of rough blowdown — burdens soaked in — we
drift, snag, and drift in the bland, seamless
river of days. Luggaged with notions of how
childhood passed as simple, detached, time without weight —
That factory yard and littered
low brush beyond, mapped and strong-armed by the unwitnessed
unguessing imaginations of kids: the asphalt an airstrip,
the hedges and bramble, jungle or forest; weedy, rust-caked twists
of machinery were burned-out
remains of heavy artillery. And the wood platform spiked into
an ash, our surveillance post, sniper roost, and H.Q.
The factory remained. Remained and sprawled, like a cinder-block
chaperone, staring out from its rows of smashed eyes —
but when a prisoner was bound to the loading
dock rails, the scavenged ropes used were real and
unreal, his pleading heard and not, heeded
and not. Disquieting to think, now, of him being grilled,
arm-burned, or worse, for information he
could ever have only made up on the spot. His interrogators left
to decide (scratching naked knees, brushing
off pangs from a skipped dinner) whether this or that cooked-up
kid’s plot was sufficiently true.
Answers offered now are as groundless. The grilling, softer:
How have I lived? Am I to become
what I think of myself? Will the world meet
and embrace me halfway, like a child chased
out of some skeletal night park into his own
arms, startled?
Only so many sounds the night will admit. Aching,
caged drone of traffic far off, small lippy
consonants deep in the plumbing, pliant complaint
from an arthritic chair leg, and the owl; memory,
its pulled-out, full-throated o’s
that loop these nights, then tighten.