Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting Read Free

residue—every effort
    must be made to scrub away
    the stain we’ve made on time.
    Â Â 
    Brady, for one, never made a photo
    of a battle as it happened. At first,
    too much stillness was required
    to fix the albumin in place.
    In the end the dead, unburied
    and left open to the air,
    were committed to the light
    as it reacted to the mostly
    silver nitrate mix. I wonder
    if it was someone’s job
    to check a watch, to time it all,
    or what it meant that Brady,
    almost blind as war began,
    would let himself go bankrupt too,
    just to get the process right.
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    I found that it was not enough
    to leave that day behind
    at the bottom of a duffel bag,
    or to linger in the backyard
    by my mother’s pond, trying to replace
    what I imagined were its fading edges
    with a catalog
    of changing leaves in fall,
    each shifting color captured
    in a frame, one shutter opened
    to a drowned and dying oak,
    the next, the water
    it was drowning in.
    Nor would it be enough
    to have myself for months secluded
    in the dark rooms
    of an apartment
    I’d wound up paying for up front,
    desperate for anything
    to keep out light, a sometimes
    loaded gun,
    and whatever solitude
    I needed to survive
    the next unraveling,
    undocumented instant.

Cumberland Gap
    I first realized I was evaporating
    when I was twelve, having heard
    Â Â 
    for the first time the word embarcadero,
    from some boy leafing through a battered copy
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    of a triple A road atlas tucked onto a shelf,
    one volume in the series of books of maps
    Â Â 
    that had for a long time composed
    the section of the library devoted to geography.
    Â Â 
    It was a place, but not in any real sense
    except the one I’d guessed at, the exotic newness
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    of a word that finished with a vowel, and if I,
    in the library of a worn-out-already rural school,
    Â Â 
    created in my mind a picture that could be called
    a fair approximation of the place as it existed,
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    the long line of the esplanade falling off
    into the distances, perhaps the fine grey of
    Â Â 
    the Pacific reaching through the uncertainty of fog,
    and then at night, the book of maps now left
    Â Â 
    open on a table, I could create the bustle
    of a group of stars that never were. I’d be called
    Â Â 
    lucky, or just dead wrong, and for a moment,
    motionless, I’d be clearly drawn to scale upon the page
    Â Â 
    with just the clarity that I had hoped for, not knowing
    the fruitlessness of having clarity among one’s hopes.
    Â Â 
    When the librarian called my name my name
    was made into a kind of spell, dispersing everything
    Â Â 
    I could identify or claim as being part
    of one certain, undisputed me, the long walk
    Â Â 
    down the hall as she held my hand, deferring
    every question I might ask until a later time,
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    and I remember the bright red dust of dried-up clay
    that swung in liquid-looking rivulets as I sat
    Â Â 
    in the parking lot and waited for my father’s Chevy to appear,
    knowing only that someone was dying, thinking only
    Â Â 
    of the word embarcadero, any place other than the place
    I was forced to occupy in time and space, any name
    Â Â 
    of any town whose weight could be abandoned
    with enough repeating, and giving up at last, the last
    Â Â 
    of the other children gone, hearing in my father’s voice
    his philosophy of living, always buy a Chevy, son,
    Â Â 
    those goddamn Fords are designed for obsolescence,
    the plan, see, is in five years it’ll break down
    Â Â 
    and you’ll have to buy another, and I asked if it was like
    the broken bicycle he’d bought for me that we’d repaired
    Â Â 
    one piece at a time until it worked, how when
    we screwed the last bolt onto the new sprocket
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    the old bike was no longer there, everything replaced,
    the broken pieces set aside and what did it mean,
    Â Â 
    and his face, which I remember over everything, lined
    with a