1944 (autumn eyes)

I volunteered. Medical supplies were needed at battalion and the evacuation hospital was near. I saw her first there, in hospital, in profile, standing over a patient. She turned her head, looked in my direction, looking pass me. This first image, in my mind even now like a photograph. That pert diminutive feminine nose, her blossomed lips, firm in youth, slightly parted. And those eyes of fall. Those gibbous autumn eyes, flecked of golden hazel, inlaid in polished marble. That smooth curve of iris rising, holding the intensity of a hundred days within the dime of her eye. Like daybreak. Like sweaters sitting on a bench before the medallions of fall. And a sadness, as if not of this place, not of this ward of silent prayers and mumbles of mother, of lost boys and stoic men, of women with hearts poured empty, of faces blank in survival, of hands rich in the blood of so many, so many faces flowing like the slow shutter blur of a photograph. This is how I remember her, that first time.

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ed note: same scene from the third person


He stepped from the jeep into the slurry snow, pulled his collar up, rubbed his hands, and gazed upward to words engraved in french. The evacuation hospital looked more like the schoolhouse it was. Instead of buses, there were ambulances and trucks and not a few jeeps. The deep green painted doors of the old building were as the banks of a narrowing river of men, the flotsam of litters carried faster and faster toward the entrance, men hanging on with the white grip of a raft in rapids.

Supplies were needed. He was doing what had to be done. Still, he was here and not there, not at the front. Everywhere was mud and slush and urgent unshaven faces dirty of soil upturned, as dirty as volunteering to go to the rear. He loitered. A little longer than necessary before the doors, school doors, a place of children as perhaps it was still, as perhaps he was, as perhaps the lingering ache in his gut of a time long ago, of a time longed for, of a place not of this place, where children ran and laughed and death unknown, all of life immortal.

Through the doors a stairway to the right. Black iron rail and the smell of, the hint of, real or imagined he could not determine, of blackboards and chalk, of uniforms new, pressed, and smelling of spring, of mom. He climbed a flight of stairs to the main floor, to what appeared to be a commons, filled with other uniforms; and cots, not desks; and charts, not notebooks. And her.

Corinthian chestnut hair, hazel eyes, muted red lips full of benediction, of blessing, the red of christmas coming, of mistletoe. She was a descant chord rising among the orchestra of tuning bodies, heard by eye, as music seen, as poetry in a sea of prose. And from a distance, in the realm of magic, of the universe expanding, of sunrise and rain and rocking chairs on old porches, of canoes in clear streams and silent paddles dipping, tilling a child between generations, as a grandson and grandfather, wordlessly in heaven of old denim and railroad caps, of tobacco chewed and shoes worn leather cracked and laced tight, he saw her standing there, in profile, of a book he wanted to read, to write, to call his own, to call theirs.