Bataan, 1942

Small, dark pucker in the skin at the end of his left
pinky finger— Growing up, I never knew the details,

did not associate that cleft shaped like a dry
asterisk in my father’s hand with the long 

march in April: hundreds of men in the aftermath
of Pearl Harbor, stumbling toward prisoner-of-war 

camps, prodded by bayonets. He never said anything
about how he came to be singled out, how some

blade must have sung high before plucking the nail
out of his flesh; how the pulp fresh in the scar

made him swoon. All wars, I remember him saying,
are most of all the deprivation of spirit. Animals

roamed the countryside, unloosed from the plow, evicted
from barns; or caught, they dripped and turned on a spit. 

Through fitful sleep the prisoners heard roosters,
their raucous crow orange in the breaking dawn.
                        

The half of a half beat before or after, the rest
and the slide up and down the scale. The doubling 

back to recover, except for the unrecoverable. 
A madman who's president wants the sentence 

revoked, the ransacker turned out of his cell 
and back into the fold. Whose ghosts roam 

the fields, their hands outstretched? A girl's
gold limbs that wintered in an abandoned van;

lamp or lyre, a child's body strung over 
a cesspool. Aphids turn trees into factories

of sugar before they damage and die. Mark my words:
that is to say, the blister that replaces bliss.
                        

Disorder in the world, and continuing desolation.
But cautiously, we step outside to marvel:
a  warm day in mid-December as if in summer.
Students cross the street, wearing flip-flops 
and shorts. Contrails sketch a cloudy commerce 
of lines again across the sky. Then at night, a swing 
thirty degrees colder. I've never been in the desert,
but I've been told water hasn't forgotten it has
a home even there. Invitation is a word
that seems to be making a comeback—
no dress code, bring or don't bring a dish
or side to share. You know loneliness  
will risk its disheveled gardens, its withered 
limbs, just to hold something tight in its arms.