You dream the
wire where your hanging flesh
tatters to bloody flags in the sun,
the battlefield stink like a butcher’s sewer
and the shop-display of no man’s land
garlands the mud with boots, cloth, corpses
pared to a clench-jawed grin; a knife-blade
speckles troutlike with rust, a china head
rattles like a dice-cup with the glass eyes within,
dainties discarded in a drawer at home
where letters tied with red ribbon leaf-drift
now. A clock-tick, a ratsfoot whisper,
and I dream the night before the last came
stained with earth like a sexton and another
man’s hand: the shell-casings, the shrapnel
I picked from a flooded ditch, a watch-face
splintered to half past ten and in the sunset
soaked to Mars; the beheaded, the detonated,
the flayed, the impaled, gathered in my wake
like a murder to the gallows, pilgrims to the cross,
a cluster of bullets like bruises in my hand.
The mortar-flares. The silence. The wasted land.
The same dream kicks and sways with the wind
each night by graveside or candlelight: I plant
red poppies and dog roses and the children play
with blind dolls and pocketknives, crying rhymes
at crows; for the dead I could not harrow,
for the words I never wrote, for the last letter
I unfolded with your smile on my face–
blasted, blown open,
unsurprised.
