What dreams remain encased inside this freckled

gourd, this ostrich egg cradled on cardboard

like the pate of a man caught catnapping on stacks

of factory cartons? My uncle, our line’s humored,

grizzled hero, who’d survived Dong Re Lao

to find he couldn’t work a paint-gun trigger

to spray his house planks gold and rose. Shadows

from morgue lights fissure the cracks: the skull shivers

on its paper mantel. I only think the rest

of a man’s attached: crouched, fetal inside

his nightmare’s flak that drifts into a mist

of candied paints. I squint, but cannot find

the hairline hasp forensics says was groined

by lobes that tried, and failed, to fuse to one join.

Portrait of D6: Male, 38 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF D6: MALE, 38 YEARS OLD/B17: MALE, 38 YEARS OLD

Propped on their brain cases, they’re twins.

So why think of two boles of smoking

aluminum, or the scorched pump stubs left off

the French and US bombers a Vietnamese

artist slabheaped as a monument to Hanoi’s

victories? Hanoi: the city “that should be bombed,”

as the general’s said to have said, “back to the Stone Age,”

as if time itself were raw material gifted

through mechanics then taken back. Like us:

rough wires and shocks, cartilage, skin. Remnants

of men, their arms tenderly lifting out

another oil-stained engine from its carriage. More

machinery that time’s ground down to parts.

We begin in beauty. What’s left is form.

F21: Male, 37 Years Old

F21: MALE, 37 YEARS OLD

To you, what am I?

A monument

in black and white, bodiless embodiment

that, like a Rorschach blot, contains

multitudes. My bone shards change

shape in mind: spread, corrupt until I’m

whatever loss you want. How could you find

out what I was? They buried me, diseased,

in institutions. Now newly risen, I’m made

the remains for those you think have none:

soldier, citizen: can you not palpably imagine them

except through me? Displayed, I’m gone.

My dun pate splits to show you—what? Calcium

buckshot, a cuirassed abdomen?—

atop a film box stamped “Contaminant.”

Devotional

DEVOTIONAL

No skull stays silent. Each spills its neglects:

the minds that syphilis or violence ravaged

marked by fissures the intern notes, checks

off on film for forensics to manage.

Photographs translate; bones speak. Too plainly

for a blind acquaintance who hates their feel

beneath his fingers: anonymous, strangely

blank: nothing about a face is real.

It’s all skull to him. He’d rather fat’s give,

a slackened muscle, some door to stand

between him and feeling, shut off what lives

beneath skin already, each bone branded

with what only death will read: skeleton key

to unlock these rooms of memory.

Devotional

DEVOTIONAL

In repeats, the TV pans across a man

dragged from his spider hole in Iraq, thin cheeks

scabs of white. Before that, towers crumpled,

flamed amid a din of voices on-screen

shrieking, while a plane sheared into the Pentagon