D E D I C A T I O N S


1. Susan Opton: Soldiers’ Faces

In hair above the forehead 
and at his neck, a woman’s hands 
touch him and his eyes resist.

And here in series life-size times three, 
un-uniformed now, alone, each 
with smooth cheek, fragile nose, 

with brown eyes or blue eyes 
each lays sideways down his head.  
Any intimacy disturbs: 

whatever done and these eyes seen 
and these ears heard. In hair close cut 
above the forehead and at his neck, 

a woman’s hands touch him, 
his mouth closed.  
No, no forgiveness.  Do not.



2. 18th Surg., Quang Tri Province, 1970

The body's conspiracies make a country, 
some hours calm as absence and wait can be, 
others a chaos of helicopter rotors, 
body parts gone, insides out, blood, new gloves – 
that your hands get slippery can kill somebody.  
And what you can never do – untangle 
the adrenalin and focus, this artery, this 
bone, another flat lung.  What you can never 
learn – who woke, talked again, what you did 
right, wrong, those faces, open mouths 
no pain, no wish, desperate with thanks.

For weeks now every morning I've seen it – 
Blencathra's wide bald and brackened dome, 
a swath of it sunlit yet at the top cloud-shaded. 

The farm backed by dark trees 
looks tiny as a thumbnail, dry stone walls 
as though with sharpened charcoal drawn 

each to contain a slightly different green,
and those clouds leaking blue 
a hurry of remnant wool.  

To look is to be again inside that wind, 
hands holding a lens 
inside a stone circle old as Egypt,

place made, each slate and lichened surface 
by human decision set deep.
And only when you turn 

does Blencathra's height seem then 
a lintel over a stone-framed door,
no idea to where.