Am

He’d be in black jeans on his haunches,

me with my clipboard and pencil, like a father and a son I suppose.

I was getting tired of the near silence of the field.

During his service, he told me one morning,

as he looked for his rolling papers in the glove compartment,

there was a woman, a colonel’s wife, who’d pick an enlisted boy

for a little fun from time to time. It was known around the base

and one weekend she picked him. The next morning, his father,

the spymaster, left a message: Don’t do that again.

‘Indeterminate inflorescence, alternating fruit, green shoulders.’

I was having an affair with a married woman myself,

eleven years older than me, who worked in the lab.

She told me her husband had killed 30 people

in the war, jumped into Lebanon.

She’d thought I’d find her repulsive,

that she could live with, hold, make love to such a man.

I think she found herself repulsive, his tongue in her mouth,

thinking death sleeps beside me yet I live.

We were at the pharmacy. She was picking up medicine for her cat.

I counted thirty people, one by one,

and of the time it took to think of each of them.

I dreamed I walked into my high school and people were hanging

from the rafters of the field house by their necks

like sides of beef, gunshots, and when someone asked my name

I said John

so they knew there was an H and would think I was a gentile.

One of those days Benny drove me to Jerusalem, the wall

where I felt nothing. Once I ended this with the line

‘while my heart becomes immobile’ and once I wrote ‘by now

they’ve both been cut into pieces!”

It obliterates the self, I guess, to see it: the wall, the line.

But another time I ended: ‘then

all the words we spoke began I am.’