From the Periphery

"From the Periphery"

1.

Spotlights shine out a hundred feet
or more, show tufts of green where grass
plowed under, struggles, shoots up.
I whisper to Claymores, 50 calibers,
M-60s, hold the dead weight of an M-79,
listen to the sounds of water buffalo and
of a distant firefight.

In that dark, men I have not really
come to know wait quietly, barely breathe
in fear that someone else will hear their breath,
hunker down, eyes barely open, listen
to their hearts beat, to night sounds
grown suddenly quiet.

The singsong cries of hootchmaids
bring me back from a place I will never go
and only, so far down inside, almost
convince myself to regret never having been.

2.

One morning in Dak To, I saw five men
who had been six, LRRPs, kicking dirt
into the sky, eyes focused straight ahead,
silent, wrung dry in the hot sun.

Sometimes commerce can not exist. Language
can not always be enough, words can not
translate what eyes have seen.

Thoughts lie fallow, spears of grass
that can not push up or out.

This, then, is what war must be: a walk
in the night, heart held in the hands of those
who walk beside you, breath held in each
other's mouths, smell shared in such a way
that all scents are one, touch only
a light pressure, hand on shoulder,
eyes searching for movement in the dark.


H. Palmer Hall



Posted over on Palmer's Poems
(Orig. In From the Periphery: poems and essays
Chili Verde Press, 1995)