...
but your body has assumed
the same posture as that army
tunic
suspended in mid-air
by the relentless memory of a
warm
and wouded presence, still shaped
by the absent contours of the
young man's
body it discarded on
a long-deserted battle no one's
ever lost or won - an now
the vestment of a dark and terrifying
angel. In your letter's
broken English you say you must
set your
daily art aside and, soon,
report for military service in
one
of this world's oldest armies.
Now you must learn the tactics
of a more
ancient art; to recognize
the enemy that hides even in a
lover's
heart and, without honor,
without guilt, but with the calculated,
mindless gestures of that long
-
danced liturgy of war, to kill
and to be
killed. My friend, don't look for
me
in this poem's loosely measured
syllabes;
for, before you have arrived
to the silent momentary peace
all
art offers to another,
I will have stepped outside of
this ballet
of breath, climbed a ladder
of my own making back into that
photograph of you and leapt
into your painting; and there,
in mid-air,
between the azure bolt
of hopeless sky and the more familiar,
human beach, I'll have assumed
that disembodied shirt as if it
had
been mine from the beginning,
and I shall hover over
you, unseen, as if, from one
dimension to another, this warm
breath
in your hair tonight were mine,
so that other angel cannot leap
from
the fabricated realm of art
and with vengeance clamp its dark
vestment
of despair around your all
too human body, you all too guileless
heart.
