Dear L, I thought I knew what I was doing
On the island, a fuselage of wrecked plane, a wing in sharp vegetation
A radar dish filled with pumpkin plants
The blue wash of a cratered road
One thinks: the way back under cover of darkness with sufficient rounds
As sickness chose from among us, we grew fewer
And so as not to appear in uniform he walked in his underwear
Through the village as if he were only strolling the asylum grounds

One morning slides aqua into the next, the night beach lit and tired
Grève painted on the wall but what Grève? Nothing to strike for here. Better pay?
Better pay for what? Everybody in this no-name village is chômeur
It means they would carry your shit for you from your ass to the pit if they were paid
They plant flowers in cracker cans on the porch stair. They plant hibiscus in their
   wrecked cars
When you are talking about stupidity, only the military knows the meaning of the
   word infinite

Always he travels without maps as it is better to become lost than spend time thinking
   about the road
He drinks holy water, then pours some into a bottle in case he needs it again
Sometimes he uses vodka for the same end
Perhaps you have seen one of them?
A familiar man or woman, maimed, or a beggar who appears in several places at once

Why now and in such numbers?
If there are two doors, then only one gives onto normal life
Here, in this open field, that can never be a field again

IX

It isn’t necessary to explain
The dead girl was thought to be with child
Until it was discovered that her belly had already been cut open
And a man’s head placed where the child would have been
The tanks dug ladders in the earth no one was able to climb
In every war someone puts a cigarette in the corpse’s mouth
And the corpse
The corpse is never mentioned
In the hours before his empty body was found
It was this, this life that he longed for, this that he wrote of desiring,
Yet this life leaves out everything for which he lived

Hundreds of small clay heads discovered while planting coffee
A telescope through which it was possible to watch a fly crawling the neighbor’s roof tiles
The last-minute journey to the border for no reason, the secret house where sports
   trophies were kept
That weren’t sports trophies
Someone is trying to kill me, he said. He was always saying this
Oranges turning to glass on the trees, a field strewn with them
In his knapsack a bar of soap, a towel the size of a dinner napkin
A map of the world he has not opened that will one day correspond to the world he has
   seen