Yesterday, when static fractured the newsman’s voice,
clouds hung thick over the roof like a mother’s hand
pressed to a child’s mouth. But my ears urged on:
the silence stopped nothing. When I closed my eyes
I could feel buildings crumble; explosions in a moth’s wings
and I needed to find a way to tell him. My father
square stanced and stalwart over the potato fields.
The tips of his Oxfords red with clay. As he tapped
the green shoots: umbilici between our stomachs
and the sky, and he wondered, I suppose, what we’d leave him.
His face the color of a heart when I said it. There is no
easy way to leave. Bicuspid. He frowned against my smile.
We are always two places: the past limping beside the present.
My brother here and there. The doctor’s hands slicing open
the ox’s chest to show me an engine of blood when I learned,
the summer our father sent us away, more than one way to heal
a man. “One of you will die.” He said unblinking towards my
eye with such conviction I somehow knew he meant
himself. But that was before it arrived. The telegraph
trembling in his hand. When I’d thought I’d stay
another season in those hills, kneel before the laboring women,
a knife sandwiched between the mattresses. I will miss their snarls,
their foul mouths singing until a smaller cry
would hush us all. “Save His Life…and Find
Your Own.” Say the wartime posters with their
white-winged and long-lashed nurses absolving men
from death, and “Join the Army Corps of Nurses” one poster
I’d folded into quarters. Unwound like a scroll
beneath his thumbs. His eyes pressing shut.
He dropped it between the potatoes stalks and walked away.
