Blades


Somehow, as a child, I avoided severing a finger in a bailer,
or thrasher. So many close calls; so much respect
for the blade, yet drawn to touch them while spinning.
It takes a certain obsession with death or curiosity.
I was working the fields at eight, listening to body counts
on the transistor radio in between sacred music.
The absurdity never got me. They never found a cure
for war and fascination with death. The curve of it
is some path I came to the edge of, then stepped back.
Slaughtering animals at an early age does that.
Standing knee deep in blood, the brown-rust of it all,
like a christening, like the reverse of a cleansing.

When I was shaking in the fields of blood,
drawing cold fire from all sides in Vietnam,
holding a man’s intestines like stands of pearls,
the chopper blades thrashing the wind into bone,
I noticed the spine, the rib cage, still hearing
the man’s radio for help, knowing there was none,

somewhere in the death surrounding us with space
was this sacred music, and the animals of bullets
could not find us in this circle, like rust cleaned off
honed to clean metal, sharpened to nick a finger.

There were no more close-calls that day
which died like a man holding the intestines of life.