my true sister, who burned three days

to blindness with the fever from which, at the last,

neither Aespaneo nor I could save her.

Assemblage of Ruined Plane Parts, Vietnam Military Museum, Hanoi

ASSEMBLAGE OF RUINED PLANE PARTS, VIETNAM MILITARY MUSEUM, HANOI

My eye climbs a row of spoilers soldered

into ailerons, cracked bay doors haphazarded

into windows where every rivet bleeds

contrails of rust. An hour ago, the doctor’s wand

waved across my chest and I watched blood

on a small screen get back-sucked

into my weakened heart. It’s grown a hole

I have to monitor: one torn flap

shuddering an infinite ellipsis of gray stars

back and forth. You’re the writer, the doctor said

in French. Tell me what you see. Easier to stand

in a courtyard full of tourists scrying shapes

from this titanic Rorschach. Here’s a pump stub

shaped like a hand; something celled,

cavernously fluted as a lobster’s

abdomen. How much work

it must have taken to drag these bits

out of pits of flame, from lake beds

and rice paddies, and stack them in layers:

the French planes heaped beneath

the American ones, while the Englishwoman

beside me peers into this mess

of metals, trying to isolate one image

from the rest. Ski boot buckle

or tire pump, she muses at me, fossilized

shark’s jaw, clothespin, wasp’s nest?

According to the camera, it’s just a picture

changing with each angle, relic

turned to rib cage, chrome flesh

to animal: all the mortal details

enumerated, neutered. I watch her trace

an aluminum sheet torched across a thruster

as if wind had tossed a silk scarf

over a face. If she pulled it back, would I find

a body foreign as my own entombed

in here, a thousand dog tags

jangling in the dark? I tilt my head: the vision slides

once more past me, each plane reassembling

then breaking apart. Spikes of grief—

or is it fury?—throb across the surface.

Everything has a rip in it, a hole, a tear, the dim sounds

of something struggling to pry open

death’s cracked fuselage. White sparks,

iron trails. My heart rustles

in its manila folder. How the doctor smiled

at the images I fed him: A row of trees, I said,

pointing at my chart. Stone towers,

a flock of backlit swallows—

Now I kneel beside a cross

of blades on which the Englishwoman

tries to focus. Do you think I’ll get it

all in the shot? she calls as she steps back.

Steps back and back. Something like a knife sheath.

Something like a saint’s skull. The sky

floats past, horizon sucked into it. She won’t.

IV. Shooting the Skulls: A Wartime Devotional

IV

SHOOTING THE SKULLS: A WARTIME DEVOTIONAL

A meditation on Andrea Modica’s portraits of skulls unearthed from the Colorado Mental Health Institute

For Holly Martin

Portrait of F19: Male, 42 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF F19: MALE, 42 YEARS OLD