1944 (my pleasance)

I bring him to my palimpsest mind, each remembrance a recreation, a revisioning. And I wonder how many times I can recall his face, his voice, his touch before all that remains resembles not what was, but what I have fashioned. Within my mind is a room. I keep him there. I weed it of encroaching memories. I maintain it like a pleasance. Yet, still, there is the coldness of distance, a distance that grows by the day as the river of this war carries us away, from that night, from that place. He is as a face, faint, at the bottom of my winter.

1944 (night falling into moonrise)

I don't know what this is.

It was the first thing he said to me beside the ambulance. We were standing. Only our breath in the cold touching. Plumery breath. As two thoroughbreds.

I know.

He reached out and put his arms on my shoulders. I remember the weight. A sense of a bridge. Something not there before. Slowly, he drew them back and with his soft hands lifted my collar such that I felt the back of his hand framed against my face. The hand of a poet. I cannot explain such a touch otherwise. His rotation, the warmth of his fingers splayed, gently pulling my satin lips to his. Like night falling into moonrise.

He breathed in. I lifted. A floating into. A flowing of rapids.

It's cold.

Yes.

Hold me.

Tight.

I closed my eyes, his breath on my ear. Warm like morning.

My name is Virgil.

I know. You told me.

I'm from Tennessee.

Kiss me again. Virgil. Like you're from heaven.

He did. He gave me heaven. He gave me much more.

Art by Andrew Jones

1944 (pieces missing)

A young boy arrived today. Maybe nineteen. Blonde hair, blue eyes and half his face blown away. Blood was caked to his hair and with his one eye he stared at me like a frightened child, his hand grasping. But there are others, many others. I could see the loops of his small intestine. Looked like eels and I thought it only I could toss them back into the sea, put them back where they belong. He trembled, his lips were cracked and dry in the cold and I gave him water and a shot of morphine. I tied the empty syrette around his neck, moved on to the next litter. They were like jigsaw puzzles with missing pieces or pieces in the wrong places. Dozens of them. Dozens more on the way.

I would tell you they died without pain or suffering; I'd tell you they died with dignity and honor; I'd tell you they died with stoic courage. If it would make you feel better. But they died in towns without names, in conditions below poverty, among odors and smell of urine and feces and decaying flesh, the stale breath of death upon their lips. And to think of the concern, of me becoming a nurse, of the prurient sights I might see, that this was argued. Mother and father. Afraid of what I might see. Afraid of what it might make me in the eyes of others. What can I tell them now of the eyes of others? Between what happens here and what is reported back home is as the ocean between us.

I lost Virgil. He died in my arms. No one can tell me the chary lies we tell the survivors. He suffered in his last hours. Pain unspeakable. Drugged such to make me wonder of his last words, what they meant, if he even knew who I was, if he even knew what he was saying. This is the doubt that eats you from the inside. The question that can never be answered, that rolls in your mind night and day, that you are reminded of on a daily basis, in the flesh and blood and sinew of the next young boy who is going where you wish you could go. Where, when I returned, my blonde haired boy had gone.

Art by Andrew Jones

1944 (M's Journal)

A new day. That's what I want. A day not like every other day. A day that does not add to the accumulation of those forlorn eyes. Fish belly white; bottom lake cold. Then I think of the boys that arrive with none. Of the children they will never see. And how must they cry, how can they cry, without eyes. . . .

And still it is cold. The last two days have been officially documented: blizzard. Snow looks like sand as it huddles against our tents, as it gets in our shoes, as it makes even the slightest trip outside miserable. The days are short of light, overcast. Everything appears darker than it is. And there is a heaviness to sound, a notch too much of bass. Wears on you. Grates on you. And you crave the one thing war can never give, yet gives too often: silence. The silence of closed eyes. From the palm of a hand.

I work with five other nurses. The 91st surgical field hospital having been spilt into thirds with the push in mid-december. We travel like gypsies following the army, living off what the war has discarded. We exist because it does. We have work because others sacrifice, which is an euphemism. This is what accumulation does. It compresses you. Weighs you down. Until you have not the strength and you break. You say things you shouldn't say, which is only a pale reflection of what you've been thinking.

I write letters home but not as often as I should. I hate the lies. I hate that I am writing to an audience that no longer knows me, that the girl they said goodbye to no longer exists; yet, these falsified letters, is what I feed them and the riff grows. And I want to say things, write things they would not recognize. So I pretend. I say that I am fine; that everything is going according to plan, that we are winning this war. And in the saying, I am saying nothing at all. I have created this other self, this former self that I inhabit when I write to them. I wear it like a dress that no longer fits. From a distance, no one can tell.

We fix what has been broken, but what has been broken, has been broken for us. Like ice in hot tea, our boys are consumed. There is pride at times and guilt. But mostly a vague disgust, a shimmering anger beyond the tongue to define. As if the eyes have rendered one mute, mute of diction for this carnage, of looking into the blue eyes of a young boy, wiping the sweat off his brow with one hand while holding his intestines in with the other, waiting for help, for his turn, telling him to . . . and then you realize those eyes are just staring. But they aren't seeing you anymore.

There is a language in eyes not seen outside of war, not seen outside the OR. We arrive; and so do they. An odd choreography, them coming from one direction, us, the other. And there are always more of them than us. Dropped in their soaked litters, those oxblood stains, damp, sticky, a look and smell not unlike calf birth. Without the birth. They lie because they can't stand, can't walk and it hits you, the obvious, these teenaged boys, who should be running and jumping like deer, can't. Some never will. Many of them were handsome.

Art by Andrew Jones

1944 (remembrance)

He was geometry, a french curve in the warm light of the ambulance. An infinity of dunes of light and shadow, his voice a whispery desert wind. There was not much room and what we did was witnessed of cloth, half looking, half abandoned, to the warmth of finger and wool upon orphaned flesh; of the ache of ripe fruit, bending branch, seeded, seeking, needed, wanting, release, upon the feminine furrow. We were wordless; and fragrant. As an orchard in maturity. Wanting no more than sun and rain and time to turn both into life.

He was bronze, iron, steel and steam. And I porcelain, a vase, redolent in dewy bloom. Where I had need, as the sun upon the blossom, he poured a warmth like golden honey, and I felt as his train, as coming down hill, fueled of an flammeous heat, a force exponential, growing; and I knew where I was going, where he was taking me, where there was no stopping. Above his eclipse of head and hair, one bulb rocked back and forth as vials of cure chimed in our breeze, that melodious sound of delicate glass, of pharmacology applauding. Like this it was. Life embracing life, in our metal cocoon, seeking a stay, wishing we could.

1944 (litter)

The next hamlet looks much like all the rest, which is to say, it looks like nothing at all, just a series of beige smudges and eyes bigger than they should be. We won't be here long and I doubt we will remember much of this place as our vision narrows on the images of two men and a litter. An endless stream of arms and legs carrying broken bodies. There are eyes there too.

Brakes, metal on metal, muffled shouting and movement. Always movement. Always somewhere to go, some thing to do as if in the doing we don't have to think. I jump from the back of the truck, all my belongings on my person. The ground here is as the ground elsewhere, a thin slice of slush over the bone hard ground. I feel the thud in my ankles. Thought is slurred. Images are not. Of other ankles floating in air. Taken from their owners. Casualties of winter.

It is impossible to feel that thud, to know you can walk, to feel that sweet pain, without also seeing the steel of a surgical saw. A grade-school sense of incongruity. Of things that don't match. We move with urgency. Running to or from is not allowed into consciousness. We just move as cold hands move to the fire. Of instinct. In the distance, that low rumble. The thunder of guns, our employer. Tethered we are to that sound. It pulls us along, never further than the ear, never more poignant than the bruised fruit of its harvest, carried by two, on a litter; and I think of that word and a bitterness grows.

1944 (moving east)

There is a tightness, just under my ribs. A corset under the skin, under muscle and nothing I eat will digest as it should. I am not ill in the way of illness and there is no medicine that can cure what afflicts me. Nights vanish and days die and somewhere between, the hours are lost as sand thrown upon the shore. This is what war does. It changes your vision, your perception, your relationships with all you know. Flowers, now, are for graves, stolen as youth, as spring in this endless winter, this endless march east, into the fire of a new day that brings not joy, but death. We move like vagabonds taking only what can be carried but our shoulders bend not of pack or rifle, but of blood, and odors, and unspeakable acts so common we are shocked at our own callousness, whistling like butchers in the day's due. And we tell ourselves lies, we build them like walls and in this way we find our shelter, our protection, our silent conspire. Writ not of letter. Whispered even not among ourselves. It is the language of eyes, for what is seen has no language, no translation and worse of all, no forgetting.

Load up! We do. Back of a truck. Low gear. You feel the vibration, smell the fumes, watch those little raccoon eyes watching you go, dirty and cold and hungry, children wearing stress and fear for warmth. We leave behind our dead, our detritus, a village with no means to support itself. Like flotsam it feels, jetsam our trail, as every bump translates straight up through the spine, ache accumulating like some account unpaid, overdue. And it all hurts. We stop. Just us and our horse breath. Shouts up ahead. Cursing. Everybody out. Mines to be cleared. Bladders to be voided. Behind a tree. Sometimes not. Nobody cares.

We spread out and crouch like shrubs. War has it own smell. It gets inside your nostrils, lives beyond any soap. Every nose runs. We blow them out of habit, out of hope that somehow, we could breathe not sweat and piss and shit and bloated putrefying death black in sun, hard as brick. You never, ever, get used to it. And you never forget it. We hear an explosion. More shouting. Medic. Medic. That word. Always shouted. Five letters. Five minutes left in a life--maybe, and you . . . cry, inside. Then you pull up your pants. Wipe your nose on the back of your sleeve and try not to shiver, the line blurred between fear and cold and a numbness that destroys the very foundation we profess to fight for. The war makes a whore of us all. Some of us admit it. Some don't. Either way, we've moving east.

1944 (news)

News has come. We are moving. Time, location, events, moving, always moving. The war makes orphans of us all as we shuffle to our next temporary home. But it has always been this way, our unit like a barge on the river, stopping only long enough to take on supplies, then again we flow with the current of that distant thunder. Only this time is not the same. This place, this hamlet of mud and muck and slush and endless snowfall as the fall of our boys as the white and red of our crosses, this place is where he fell, where his eyes last saw light, where my arms last held his weight. This is the news. That I must leave this place, known only to me, my secret religion, a ground sacred to no one, save myself; and I am all but lost.

1944 (a warmth)

I read his journal. Then again and again and again until what seems clear looks foreign. As if with each reading, I am taken deeper into the green hills of Tennessee, away from what I know, to some strange and enchanting place where pretense is abandoned as clothes before skinny dipping. And it does feel this way, like I am skinny dipping into his most inner thoughts, doing something I am not supposed to do, looking into another's journal. But I do it anyway.

So each night, while the others take to town, I escape into his words, his thoughts, into the mind of one I long to know, knowing, I never will. Still, these quiet moments alone, it feels as if we are together, my cot, a lamp, a greenish-brown wool blanket and this little black book, a gateway to what remains, what lives and I wondered at the life of words, our words to outlive us, to give pain or pleasure. And I imagine he is watching me, read him; and that even in the next life, he feels a warmth coming from this realm; that even in this hell of death and destruction, huddled upon a cot, his words held in the bowl of my hands, there is a warmth.

1944 (wind and sail)

he was worn leather
and loud gun oil;
sweet tobacco, rye whiskey
and musk sweat

he had roman hands
not the fingers of war
and his bore eyes
held what no eyes should

he was pure ore
and Tennessee corn
a slow tongue
careful with a word

his lips were country full
warm as mountain sunshine
smooth as the edge
of a rainbow

he had a Cheyenne nose
and complexion to match
skin calf soft
ruddy, flush, alive

his slabbed chest
was as plow
steeled it seemed
in the wages of soil

his arms lean
veins of wire
muscles as rope
taut, tight, lithe

and when he kissed me
I was as the wind
before a storm
before the rain
before his slap of lightning
struck dumb

he held me thus
as a sail holds
the breeze
and I felt as
upon the ocean

filled of him
fulfilled of us
wind and sail
together
sailing

this is how
it was
this is how language
fails me now

this is how
my memory
grows him like crop
forever spring

in the mornings

in the mornings
with cups of mist
steaming fresh brew
we watch
the quiet falling of snow
preen pine
bend bough
and crown the fence

we talk
not of trivial things
nor of things to be
but of the hare
the flower
that ruby dabble
twining the birdbath
like a king's robe

there are no sighs
nor cruel words
or looks askance
of integrity

just coffee
warm
and conversation
weaving
gently
the syllables
of the day

1944 (another land)

her warm weft of fingers
gently, lightly
weaved my hair
and in the weaving
wove something more
than the lace of
my lock
there was a kindness
a knowing
in her touch
full her fingers
of pulse
of everything
this war was not
and her eyes
as if in concert
as if conductor
watched my silky
warp
watched the loom
of her ministrations
and I thought
of her tender eyes
her blushed lips
the pertness of
a nose breathing
my breath
the glow of her skin
in the warm light
and I felt
as if
in another land

1944 (blank)

I found a quiet place, away from the war, away from everyone else, both of which were small miracles. His notebook was small, a black cover, worn and dirty. Still damp in his blood, the pages stuck. I gently separated them with my nail and as I began to read, his mind opened to a depth I could not fathom and I began to drown in a language deeper than I could swim, as if, from the grave, he was pulling me under, revealing a serenity and sensitivity, seductive as sand and sea, shells and sun, of the call of all things free of the hands of men. As free as he was now from this war.

I read, almost dreamlike, for I have not slept. Beside his book, that blackness, those words like hooks in my eyes, that damning man who will not be back, who will not allow me life, who upon the writing of his mind, has stolen mine. But beside that torrent of pages, they lie. Like little paddles without a handle. I have not the night, nor the knight for that matter, but I have the lance, the sword, the syrettes, arranged, ready in foil, ready to swim in the vale of my veins, to warm what is cold, to send me where this army will not.

If I had but the courage; for what they say is but a another lie. There is no courage in the glass. A pathetic pathology, but nothing else. The numbing of common sense, the narrowing of vision, but as I look upon the paddles, those little tubes ready to take me home, my pilfered plunder as the wheatened one might say, I know I can't. Not this night. So I read more from his blood stained journal. This final testament. And I stare upon the pages toward the end, those blank pages filled now with nothing. And I know tomorrow they will still be blank as they will next week and the year after. Blank of him. Blank of me. Blank of us.

1944 (notes)

her harrow fingers plying
plowing
pillaging
plundering

(ploy or play
who could say)

my wheaten hair
swaying in the
song of her
susurrations

sensual, sinful
sacred she seems

watershed (water shed)
her lips
brimming
damming (damning) my
eyes

crying, weeping
as blood
falling
as petals

as the taking
of wax
into
smoke

into visions
and shadows
and unspoken
sighs

into the falling
that rises
the dawn
anew

1944 (like a kite)

I can't do it I told her. Trucks. Jeeps. Bodies. The deep crimson of blood on rough wool, of hair matted. I can't. I just can't.

Over the yelling she shouted.

I just stared.

Her arm grabbed mine. I saw her mouth moving. Anger in her eyes. Trucks kept coming. Men running. Yelling. Shouting.

My knees were muddy. Cold. My hand red in him. And still. Trucks came. Bodies came. More yelling, came.

And I remember. A kite. I felt like a kite in winter. My arm a string. And Kate, that was her name. I remember her pulling me. Shouting. Pulling. And I wanted to fly, into the falling snow. Above the convoy of engines. Away from everything dull green. Of blood no longer red.

There were tents. And doctors. Flashes of silver. Cutting cloth. Opening flesh. Snow fell. Men ran with stretchers. Armbands dirty. Baggy eyes. Dirty hands. They ran on fumes of legs. And there were needles. Packets. Bandages. Yelling. Shouting. Whimpering. And eyes that leaked glassy muddy rivers over hollow cheeks.

Do your job. Do your job. I remember her saying that. I don't know if she said it more than once, but I heard it like an echo. I remember seeing my legs move, and my hands. And those words as more wounded arrived in this place without a smile, where Virgil had come. This place their mothers would never know. Their boy's last light. Three weeks from a telegram. Clean, crisp, direct as if giving dignity where there was just yelling and shouting and snow falling into the slush, muck and mire of misplaced blood.

So I did my job. And their blood mixed with his. And I cursed them all for dying, for making me die, for making me hate the world and everything in it.

1944 (the morning of)

Before sunrise, I rose. As a feather it felt, rising upon the heat of last night, tethered to no thing. And floated as if underwater, exploring an ancient vessel, slipping from one room to the next, till, there, a chest, of jewel and gold, of every worry released like bubbles to the surface. This is how I woke, like a beast burdened no more of yoke. And I felt the strength of ten. I felt it in my resolve, in every movement sure and quick, every step as if royal, as if the maiden rescued, as if the laws of life no longer applied to me. My lithe curves seemed divine, gymnastic taut, flesh blooded in life, fueled by unlimited possibilities. In that morning, upon that floor, in the quiet of snow falling, I breathed an air not breathed before, my lungs alive to grasp the day, hungry to swallow the hours, to devour the time before I saw him again. Too soon it could not come. Too soon. Like a bell tolling. Too. Soon. Too. Soon. Yet. Too soon he came. Bloodied of cheek, limp of limb, eyes dark, lost, vacant as lakes in the falling snow. And my morning, hence a hand full of hours, was as if another life, another time, as if a door shut, my treasure gone, my time expiring, the dim light of reality calling from the surface. A tug of my sleeve, pulling me up, away. And like that, he was gone. And whoever that girl was in the morning, she too, was gone.

Thunder and Rain

Thunder in the distance, the night's work to come as it has come before me and as it will grow the grass of my grave. There is just the one lamp, by which I read, looking over my shoulder, perched on a bookshelf like an owl. I share my nights with words, those worlds of letters splayed as folio, ideas like flame flickering shadows into the tangled recesses of my briar, soothing the thorns of my darkness and further lighting the path with no end, dark as the thundered night, immense as the Milky Way my city has stolen from my eyes and the eyes of my child.

The first gentle diffident pawing upon my roof closes my eyes. The rain has come, softly, shyly as if pulling a blanket over a sleeping child. I listen with my mind, watching language emerge in explanation and I wonder if the rain knows it is rain and the thunder thunder. And if so, do they live in the same ideological prisons as I, labeling every experience as this or that, right or wrong, good or bad. And if the rain knew it was just rain, would it still feed the fields and dance upon the lakes and paint pictures upon my windows, like children do. So I close my eyes and let these ideas drift away while remaining with the rain, the sound, the hue and texture.

Like a thousand fingers strumming, the rain announces itself. Like the distant roar of a stadium, thunder as percussion, muted as color in the perspective of miles. My mind returns and I label the rain feminine and the thunder masculine, one gentle, the other boisterous and demanding, loving the one, fearing the other; and I think, what if I have it all wrong. What if everything I believe is of a map incorrect. If the rain and thunder are something greater, something beyond the box I've placed them. But the thunder thunders again and the rain picks up and I forget what came before in my mind in the way one forgets the song played before when the song you want floats through the air.

It is raining tonight. And thundering. And me and my lamp and my book of Keats sit, one as silent as the other as we make space for the concert of the night.

sky and mountain

Upon the mountain, there is a line. Before it, help. Beyond it, you're on your own. The steps are no different, to lift, find a hold, belay. The mountain itself makes no such distinctions. Nor do the clouds, wind, rain or cold. But the climbing before and the climbing beyond is as child to adult. And everything the same, looks different as if beyond that line, you enter a new country with a new language, where miles are now meters and water turns to gold, and the burden of a jacket is now the thin line between hypothermia and seeing another sunrise. The few who climb these slopes beyond have no need to talk of it, for the talk of it is not it, can never be it, can never be but a lie of it. And these few are drawn as baby to mother, as buttery lips to nipple, to nourish this lost continent within the soul, this vestigial, atavistic longing to know the sky and the mountain within, this place lost below the tree line, where the paths are compacted and the shrubs receding as lives are lived watching others.

Candace (pre-wedding)

that jewel, that diamond

A small rabbit has made a home in my backyard. Not much bigger than the palm of my hand, he feeds on my lawn just outside my breakfast nook. When he is not eating, he rests against the side of my house, behind a lavender hydrangea, his brown brindled fur blending into the brick, a shadow upon our mulch. This morning, with robe and coffee, I knelt a few feet away, my bare feet on our stepping stones, just to the left of our birdbath. Between the green leaves, I saw my friend, puffed of fear I imagined at the sight of this robed giant peering. As we starred each other down, neither of us moving of our own motives, his eye caught a glint of sun. A diamond in the bush, against the wall, upon the pine bark. I squinted my eyes to fade the sight, leaves muting into pastel shadow, and the eye, that jewel, that diamond became a magnificent starburst, a blinding light, the bling of nature, of a baby rabbit, alone, huddled, still as dawn. I squinted and starred at this remarkable sight for perhaps thirty seconds before the hand of a cloud stole my wealth, and his brilliant coruscating eye, that dewy sparkle, was gone, gone as the morning to noon. Only quicker. And I thought to myself, if this were the last sight I ever saw, I'd be happy with that.

letters: Keats to Brawne, 1819

excerpt:

I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks, your Loveliness and the hour of my death. O that I could have possession of them both in the same minute. I hate the world; it batters too much the wings of my self-will, and would I could take a sweet poison from your lips to send me out of it.

Isle of Wight, July 25

pages blur

sphered skies are riven!

a decade of days
in the salted wash
a littoral drifting
nooned of sun
watered of horizon
his
undrinkable tongue
bloated
beyond
speech

within double-breasted tweed
the heart of Adonais
pages blur
letters awash
the detritus of parchment
of broken sentences
of lonely ink
faded

of epics
and sonnets
and unspoken
odes

living, alive
beyond the tempest
sea
for what remains
beyond the Viareggio pyre
beyond the Spanish Steps
and whispering fountains
beyond Rome and Hampstead
and Leghorn
but words
these immortal words

a thing of beauty is a joy for ever;
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness;
__________

words come
as
rock
hellions
tumbling
without grace
by ones
and twos
hellbent

terminus bound
Newtonian
Newtoned
clouds of dust
plumes of hush

__________

to break what is broken
to walk to that cliff
and leap without flight
with pen not quite right

borne darkly,
fearfully,
afar

Coming 18 September

I've been immersing myself in all things Keats for the last few weeks in prep for Bright Star. Currently reading Stanley Plumly's Posthumous Keats: a personal biography, which is gorgeously written, one poet to another, with such an abiding love of author for subject one cannot but marvel at the word, the written word and how it reaches through time, altering forever how we see, feel and move in the world. Currently only available in hardback, a paperback version is coming soon. Highly recommended to all lovers of biography; and if you love Keats too, well, you're going to smile a lot.

Official movie site with a trailer I've watched more times than I care to admit:

Bright Star

Sumus Quod Sumus

Sumus quod sumus

Sometimes you have to break something in order to fix it

Once you break it, there is no guarantee that what is broken is not just more broken

There is no guarantee that things will ever be fixed

There is no guarantee the sun will rise tomorrow

Never assume you've hit bottom

If you're still taking breath, there is still room to fall

If you're still taking breath, there is still time to reach

Bootstrap or limb

Reach

Forever

Reach

__________

Sumus
quod
sumus

Sometimes
you have to break
something
in order to fix it

but once you break it
there is no guarantee
that what is broken
is not
just
more broken

There is no guarantee
that things
will ever be fixed

There is no guarantee
the sun
will rise tomorrow

Never assume
you've hit bottom

If
you're still taking
breath
there is still
room
to fall

__________

If
you're still taking
breath
there is still
time
to reach

bootstrap
or
limb

Reach

forever
Reach

1944 (the train)

The trains are running again. I’ve not eaten in more than a day, yet sitting here, in the station, I feel heavy, not hungry. I watch the endless movement of bodies boarding, disembarking, running, moving, flowing--so much energy, so much life. There are clocks everywhere, and steam, a murmuring sea of unintelligible conversation, of steel wheels on steel rails and brakes and pistons, of men in caps and whistles, women with tears and uniforms with stoic faces. And through it all, I feel a heaviness in my chest, my breathing shallow, my eyes absorbing every hug, every goodbye, every kiss, every letter and package exchanged. This time, here, on this bench, this cold wooden pew, seems of all time, of the only time, and I realize, for the first time, tomorrow is blank--I've no thought for it; or any day beyond the day beyond the day, beyond. No picture, no dream, no hope. What I see now, here, in this station, is all.

My train arrives, a single large headlight, snorting steam like some overworked draught horse weary of the day's work done and the night's work to come. The beast sits, beaded in sweat of laboring iron and steel, a door open, a uniformed body calling forth. The voice sounds like voices do in a dream, or from underwater and my legs refuse to move. But I know I must go. He calls again, looking my way as if he knows this is my train and he knows I must go and he knows as he must have known of others too, no one wants to go where we are going.

I take a seat by a window and look out. Departure comes with a small jerk. The window framing the world, a muted canvas flowing by on a soundtrack of steel and steam and the melodic clacking of rail travel. The land, mostly pasture, looks untouched, quilted in snow, stitched by paths and roads, decorated in trees and bushes and shrubs. Farm houses appear faded in twilight as if watercolored on my glass, quiet as the chapel in dark and I wonder of the families, if they are there, inside, cooking dinner, lighting candles, saying prayers, teaching a child to read, knitting a sweater, sweeping a floor of yesterday. It is easier to think of them than to think of me, to lose myself in their world than to be lost in mine.

We travel through the night. The train slipping east into darkness, our coach unlit, pitch as the future I cannot see. Outside the window, snow lies as a blanket, a cold pastoral cloak, hushing the ground as mother to child into the slumber of a gently falling lullaby. I see no light in the small villages we pass, I feel no heat within our cabin, I hear no conversation from eyes that can’t sleep. Eyes like mine, mute in thought. Numb in fear. The fear of returning, the fear of the known.

The sense of heaviness remains. My thoughts, leaden, languid, lethargic, listless, and I fear, lifeless. This train more easily crosses the country than I in crossing my legs. In the window a ghostly visage, pale as a shallow sea before littoral eyes I hardly recognize, lost on the ocean of this war. And I think of the days I cannot forget and curse the hands of fate that have delivered me to this god forsaken shore. I feel as driftwood, useful only in consumption, in fire, in giving of myself fully to exhaust what I can’t touch. Or maybe I’m just cold, as again the snow falls.

1944 (Cymbeline)

The nave emptied into the street, into the night, exhaling the last of its keep upon snow and cobble. I remain alone with the marbled saints, their tongues as silent as mine, as silent as the vestibule after the doors closed. Only the flicker of candles speaking of human hands, of the shiver of prayer, of hope, of beginnings and, perhaps too, of endings.

In the absence of joy, that tide of happiness released into those narrow stone corridors, I sat. Cold returned with the dark, my knees as a child before the father. And what had been held was released, my face a muddy mess, alive I knew by evidence of tear, the economy of the thorned heart, as productive as the bomb factories back home.

There was no place to kneel, but I kneeled anyway. I wanted to feel the cold stone, wanted the pain to take my mind away from my own self-indulgent sorrow. I draped my arms over the chair in front of me, laced my fingers and looked toward the alter, toward the icons of veneration. I said a few words to myself that others might consider a prayer. But there was nothing. Nothing but silence and pain and cold. Just me kneeling in a cold dark church, alone. I felt as if God was in the forsaken business and I thought if he could do what he did to his son, what could, would he do with me? I was beginning to think I knew the answer. And I envied the ignorant.

After some time, my knees are numb and I no longer see the point of my self-inflicted pain. I return to the war tomorrow. There will be enough pain; as an ocean to my bucket, only what is wet is red and what burns is the realization there is nothing you can do to stop the tide. So we endure and don’t much talk about it.

Churches always bring out the confessional in me so I’ll say this too: we don’t much pray about it either. I pull upon the massive wooden door, a cold blast of winter rushes in, flickering candles and rustling a few missives. My hair feels frosted with a hairspray of snow. The streets are silent now and mostly dark under the clouded sky. My hotel is just a few blocks down the street. I walk alone. There is no sense that he is with me. There have been no visions or visitations. He left me memories but no more. My heels are my meditation, clicking stone like clock, my breath perfuming the air, my eyes dry in the cold.

I couldn’t sleep so I did what I always do, read. I read until I wept, such the power of Cymbeline, of this stanza:

‘Till the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle;
Nay follow’d him till he had melted from
The smallness of a gnat to air; and then
Have turn’d mine eye and wept.

And so I wept, wept for what I didn’t have. Wept for what I knew I’d never have. And in this way, upon my wet pillow, found slumber waiting.

When I woke, I returned to Cymbeline with my coffee as I sat before my window, ledged in snow. I read but a few lines:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

And I wept again as if sleep were an interlude, a temporary respite. My tears as the snow, falling and falling without end.

1944 (Paris)

From the coast she stops in Paris. Stays in the Latin Quarter. Visits Notre Dame, walks the quays in the light snow, browsing bookshops, standing under the Eiffel tower at night. A solitary diamond on the velvet of the night. During the day, she sips coffee, watching passersby as if the war itself were past, or perhaps just passed. A concupiscent city, untouched. A world unto itself. A magical snow globe. A jewel outside the circumference of death and destruction. A place as imaginary as real. Even in darkness, a city of light, of life.

On the silent eve of her last night, she walks the quarter’s old stone, jacket and beret sprinkled with a sugary snow, her heels as horse-drawn carriage upon the stone. From a distance she hears a lone trumpet holding a note without edge and enters a warmly lit chapel. The nave arches as bone, a sanctuary of robe and gown against the cold. Upon the alter, a couple. Black and white, a shimmer of gold. Vows en français. She stands at the back, the recessional a faded dreamlike river of smiles, of a life beginning, a flower of civilization amidst the barren landscape of carpet bombing and endless shelling.

And So It is Done

Candace (my daughter) approximately two hours before the ceremony.

8/8/09

1944 (draft)

First draft of a letter Mary penned to her mother. It was never mailed. (click on the image to view--the second letter is the same as the first with a bit of texture and color added in photoshop)

1944 (journal 29 Dec 44)

29 December, 1944

On the beach, the boardwalk, across petite tables, holding hands, window shopping, like two moons revolving around their invisible world. I see them. Everywhere. Uniforms and skirts. Scarfs and smiles. And I die a little more with each sighting.

Into the early eve, Venus rises, as my glass, alone. She seems a sister, this goddess of love, shining bright in a sky without companion. A diamond in the lilac ink of twilight.

Fingers of heat reach forth, crackle of fire, my cheeks winefully warm. I’m thinner than before. Less of me without appetite; less of me without him. As if he took something; as if in the forging of us, the melding of that night, I, we, were replaced with us; and the I before the us is a place on no map I know. How does an us become an I again?

I am a pot without boil, a flower without bloom, petals as lips, closed. Bee-less. My ache, numb. More than December is cold. Nothing I can do will warm what this fire cannot touch. Where do you go when there is no home?

1944 (night comes early)

Night comes early in winter and the heat indoors feels unlike a summer heat. Not even of wooled autumn. Sitting alone, a waiter fills my glass and I watch the pouring of wine, this blooded grape, taking the shape of my crystal, from waterfall to pond, holding chandeliers like stars. I order, forgetting of what, before the waiter is out of sight, just staring at my wine, at my dear vinaceous tulip. Do I do that to him? Do I fill his image full of me? Do I know even not of what he tastes? Questions impossible to answer as I ask for another and then another, bottle.

1944 (two chairs)

I wake to natural light, no sound, not even a clock. Adrift on waves of white linen and down pillows and a burgundy comforter embroidered in gold. Somewhere, a hint of lavender infused with woodsmoke, of plain soap, of the coffee not on my nightstand, of the dampness of cold milk, of the croissant I forgot to order.

The poster bed seems larger than it should. Like a jacket a size too big. No matter how I move, hands or legs, back and shoulders, I can't make it fit. Strangely, I feel watched. Four pineappled post, silent sentinels, ramrod straight. Adorned in epaulettes of fruit carved, by hand or machine I cannot tell. Each looking without looking and I wonder of the things they've heard, the sights they've seen, the nights they shook.

From the balcony, light slats the rug and I can tell the sun is not hindered with cloud. And the thought occurs that the sun will do its work alone and for reasons hard to explain, I find some comfort in the thought, some desire to walk the beach and feel that solitary touch of warmth on this winter day. I can also see what I did not see last night. Upon the balcony. Two chairs.

They were there last night as I drank and imbibed Puccini, allowing myself the luxury of an indulgence I'd not had in France. I suppose in the same way the bill for whiskey comes in the morning, not the night. And what I had drowned in the dusk, and cast to the wind of an ocean night, would not be denied in the harshness of a sun long at work. This room was meant for two. A place for lovers. A retreat from the ordinary, from the machinery of commerce, where breakfast came on a tray and juice was squeezed and robes were thick, luxurious, and hung by twos. Belts tied round tiny invisible waists with collars rich as pelt splayed upon rosewood hangers. He is not here. He will never be here. I cannot state the fact more clearly.

I slip a robe over my bare skin. Poke the fireplace. Turn a chair to the french doors. And begin to write, all that I can remember, every detail, no matter how small. His name was Virgil. Immediately, I draw a line through these words as I had drawn breath at their sight. I begin again. His name is Virgil. I stop. Hold the pen across my lips. Let those four works soak into my morning, in my memory. And I am the widow that never was. The maid never married. And I hold a story within my heart without an audience. My burden is my own.

1944 (Puccini)

White snow. Green uniforms. Red blood. Merry {censored} Christmas.

Soon after I uttered those words, I was given leave. Ordered actually. To the coast, a small village south of Calais. Took a room to the sea with a stone balcony. Me, a notebook and Puccini. Libation could be purchased, as it would, as he could not.

As the needle flows within the groove, I listen. Over and over, like the sturgeon waves pounding the beach. Relentless cracking slaps, of beach, of memory, of a night when I was sand. I listen into the whiskey. Into her voice, the lyric. Reclining on the balcony, crystal ambered in one hand, holding tight with the other. I wore a long, thin pleated skirt, legs spread as before, hair dancing with the sheer curtains, into the room, into the aria. Alone. As the beach in winter. As that night, into the static . . .

O mio babbino caro
Mi piace, è bello, bello
Vo' andare in Porta Rossa
a comperar l'anello!
Sì, sì, ci voglio andare!
e se l'amassi indarno,
andrei sul Ponte Vecchio,
ma per buttarmi in Arno!
Mi struggo e mi tormento!
O Dio, vorrei morir!
Babbo, pietà, pietà!
Babbo, pietà, pietà!

translation:

Oh my dear papa
I like him, he is handsome, handsome
I want to go to Porta Rossa
to buy the ring!
Yes, yes, I want to go there!
And if my love were in vain,
I would go to the Ponte Vecchio
and throw myself in the Arno!
I am being consumed and I am tormented!
Oh God, I'd want to die!
Papa, have pity, have pity!
Papa, have pity, have pity!

1944 (Virgil)

Bombs fall. Wounded arrive. Boys still alive. Boys with a chance. I have to go. Two soldiers I do not know pull a cloak over his face. Carry him away like one might move old inventory to make room for the new. She grabs my arm. Says let's go. I watch them leave. I watch him, go. I watch some part of me, go. Boys with a chance are coming. Where was his chance? Where? Where in God's name was his? There are no bells. I see no vision. Receive no succor. You see, boys with a chance are arriving. We have to go. We have to turn around. We got to go she says. We got to go.

They turn a corner, round a muddy tent. Snow falls. I want to throw myself over a cliff. Curse every cross all the way down. Overhead. Baritone P-47s throttle. Like thunder in a dream. Her arm pulls me up. Back into the hell. We start walking away, in the muck, the slush, the blood. Did you know him she breathes. Yeah. Kane, I say, Virgil. He was Virgil Caine.

__________

random commentary:

bombs fall (like some never ending nightmarish fireworks show it sounds--a low rumble, something boiling and bubbling just over the horizon--I feel nauseous even using such quaint and feeble and misleading terms as fireworks and rumble and boiling and bubbling--to use the words I'd like would turn reader from the page, make sticking a finger down your throat seem like fun)

boys arrive (in various bits and pieces, sans an arm, a leg, half a face, stages of unnatural undress, mud and blood, the smell of urine and feces wet and caked as the mud, faces contorted, skin stretched over bone, a grotesque masquerade of life imitating death; what we see and smell and hear cannot, will not be found in a book or newspaper or movie--so there is the unreality of our experience--something that defies understanding without direct contact and we live, we return as ghosts, our tongues silent, as dead as the youth slaughtered)

boys with a chance (not dead yet, although what has died is known but not seen; many hoping to join their other half in a place anywhere but here)

I have to go (I don't want to go. I want to die. Join Virgil. Escape this place, this above ground hell and I dream of opening my arms, to a bomb falling, just for me, bright light and from this place I am free)

two soldiers (who are these boys; what right do they have to carry him away, to take him from me, to act as if this is just another routine task, one of many, moving bodies like moving furniture, some part of them shut off and I wonder if they, if I, will ever be able to turn it back on; or is it gone too, like Virgil, gone without ceremony, without notice)

cloak over his face (I have nothing to add. some things are beyond words. a horror felt but not talked about. who would I talk to? who would know? and at the end of the day, what really is there to be said. but that image stays as if everything else was a moving picture and this a photograph)

1944 (rising moons)

The national military cemetery is just down the road. As you might imagine, I go often. He is one of thirty-five thousand rising moons, which is what I call those tombstones. White. Uniformed. Rounded. That semi-rough texture of sandstone. Each standing proudly, shoulder to shoulder for as far as the eye can see. I go in sun and in rain, and especially in the snow, when it is bitter cold and stand with them as long as I can, knowing they stood too in the heat, the cold, the snow, in the bitterness of dying anonymously, far from home, leaving mothers to greave the unnatural grief of parent burying child, of wife widowed, of unborn child fatherless.

Seldom, seldom do you find anyone else there. I stand amongst them, as in a sea of whispering green, as if they murmur a language sui generis, free now to speak of what could not be spoken before, of fear, and of forgiveness. And there are more days than not I envy the groundsmen. Days I wish I could exhaust myself in the landscaping, the care, to be among those, those young boys who had not what I have, who died mostly without notice, without fanfare and who lie here now, all but abandoned. Come with me. The silence will do you good.