untitled. lchristopher.

october into vietnam; forts sill; benning; bragg; you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows; Tace et Face (Be Silent and Act); 1968 draftee/height of Tet. goodnight pop i love you.

~author photograph gratefully credited to the poet Arden Levine.

I am in love 
with Lindsay, he says
and we are going to die.
there are no beatings
and the bushes remain
meek and silent
as the charcoal blonde
folly cocks back his 
arm and trains
one holy carbine
at the temple
in the distance
on a sand-blown hill 
near a town
now called America.

I am in love,
he says,
and it is not the understanding
that the world
is no longer on our side
but the red feeling
the others lying unspooled upon the thin grass
that brings it home to us
in spades.
bootless our platoon leader
sipping gin gimlets on the parapet
between this world and some other,
his ruined eyes open to it all.

I listen to his pocket-watch
and what the blonde boy has to say of love,
thinking of our warm bodies, some 8 months before
winning Eastern lotteries, 
kissing pale girls that tasted of Coca-Cola,
wearing designer skirts we pressured past their knees.
Believing that liberty was ours alone
and that everyone lived forever.
now, just whisperings in
the Republican coffers
we roll the die,
we vote in absentia.

I write letters:
Father,
October has come again
and this deserted village
lies vast
and silent.
we smoke delicate
random
cigarettes
looking at the ruins
and waiting
seventeen years
for an impossible dawn.
October.