Some men's voices rose and fell far away. Time changed. Time got stupid and I stood in line with the gobs, our drawers at our feet so our cheeks we could pull apart. One boy's hole was plastered closed with his own dried months of shit, and the doctor called a second doctor in and the sergeants arrived feigning aimlessness. Oh la the boy sang to the doctors who giggled like men when they dreamed about war. I could not imagine that a man would shit himself and let his own shit dry himself closed. I didn't know you could do that so they would not take you into the state; So they would not make you cross through that door of lies into the greenery's mist. All night that night I rode out on a slow train with my cousin, and drunk, I pissed from the upper birth down onto him passed out in the birth below. He never woke up but I thought I should wash him soapy clean for the killing that I didn't know waited for us like a bloody handkerchief, snagged in the bushes, found by the beast who joins in the search for the slaughtered. First published in @3The Kenyon Review@1, Volume 22, #1, Winter 2000. www.kenyonreview.org | Discover our Poem Explanations and Poet Analyses!Other Poems of Interest...A POET'S EPITAPH by EBENEZER ELLIOTT WINTER EVENING by ARCHIBALD LAMPMAN MY MARYLAND by JAMES RYDER RANDALL FOUR PRELUDES ON PLAYTHINGS OF THE WIND by CARL SANDBURG THE CORAL INSECT by LYDIA HUNTLEY SIGOURNEY |