Because I didn’t know the welts on your arm

pulsed to show where a belt dug in,

I only compared them to my mother’s

red markings—a shoulder punished

by a tote bag loaded with books.

Now I know the groceries I helped deliver

across the threshold of a stale motel room,

the bread and sandwich meat in my hands,

were part of the contract that ensured

you’d never be able to explain to me

what bends and burns you like a spoon,

crushes you against the floor, what apparition

haunts you, whispering up your arm,

“Become my petite opening,

itching wound,

my collection of used-up veins.

My wraith, I’ve studied

your chasms.

None are too great. The answer

to the question

your rolled up sleeve asks

of God is yes. He does

have a point. I have come

to stitch all

this torn sky back together.”

I Do Have a Seam

I Do Have a Seam

Triage

Triage

A suture would be useless

and a tourniquet can’t choke off

blood when it spills

from this far up the inner thigh,

so the medic tells PFC ______

his hand will stay there,

pressing on that strip of fabric.

He promises the scarlet flag,

once surrender-white, will manage

to hold him firmly to the world.

He tells him sandboxes are filling up

with the trucks and bulldozers

of the soldier’s children

and army men with green heads jutting

from the sand. He repeats I won’t let go

whenever mortar fire whistles near

the field tent and the limbless

come on gurneys

from the fires. The flowers

are snapdragons; there is a garden

he will raise. As singed paper

flutters around them

like a veil-black snowfall, he has to

remind the soldier about the earth’s ability

to give life, to recover

from tilling and burning, about rivers

that fill seas that fill oceans

that throb with the electric blue

seahorse and ambling crabs.

The medic tells him, over the scrape

of men dragged off, some still twitching

with life, that he too will live—

another lie woven into the gauze

he’s been winding all day.

The Man Who Paints Mountains and Helicopters

The Man Who Paints Mountains and Helicopters

for Rodney Denne

You are not the choice,

no matter what it looks like today

even if the canvas calls you survivor

or whole. Remember there was no omen,

no rocket-shaped cloud to say

two Black Hawks would fill up

with the living only to be emptied

of the dead by your platoon

who went on foot

because you asked for a coin toss,

because you called it in the air

and nothing you can call god

or fate held that coin in its fist,

turned that face towards sky.

You say nothing divine

guided your hands into the debris

as you sorted metal from man

and found only wreckage,

rifled through fused dog tags

and welds of limbs, wondering

who began where. How