Skip has been and gone from places that you will never get to.
--Skip James
I'm trying to understand
the keening of an icy, rippled river,
the misfortunes another Sunday brings.
Snowstorms chop light
to short hours, -fierce labor. Sylvio's lost the feel
for what another day has to offer.
He feeds the fire with weeks of unmailed letters,
long neck labels, a child's crucifix.
I'm studying Graham Greene—
¬to learn the protocols of deceit,
to determine what my next name should be.
The Saba Valley is blind and bound by ice,
on the fifth day of winter,
in the fourth year of the war.
I came through the frontier at fourteen.
Within 3 seasons
I learned the killing lessons in life:
how to lie, how not to lose,
when the Mississippi razor rule applies.
I was never innocent.
Patient, brutal
I make my mark at night.
"I never watch the sky anymore," Sylvio said.
"I was a cotton farmer's kid.
I used to know a Resurrection moon from the quarter.
I used to plant at the wane.
Now I run the carny rides in season
or take bets at the Maritime Union hall."
We're sleeping on hammocks at the Samson Jhee Motel,
waiting for our AB tickets
so we could board the freighter Memphis Deuce.
Recruited out of Arkansas,
Captain Joe Turner braced us for the load:
ten missionaries to Singapore,
guns and mercenaries for the China coast.
Two mornings from shipping out
I leave a pipe house off the Levee Crawl,
catching the first fade of neon,
the headlights of the early bus.
Under the weakness of a rising winter sun
I'm carried through
the smeared blue, green, yellow of Chinatown calligraphy,
muddy, greyed shreds of handbills and bulletins,
the sleek slice of storefronts
blocked in crystal, high fashion, sale prices.
From the steeple of the Bentonia Baptist Church,
the Sunday banner reads: "Your death redeems mine."
Okie Jack and Sylvio are sneering
as I stop outside the Lazarus Kitchen.
Marchers fill the streets
beneath the starred-blue Unity flag.
"I never liked these people," Sylvio said.
"I'll show how much today."
When the cook closed the blinds and doors,
I took a booth in the back.
The big screen Sony ran
cable news, cable sports all night.
I saw Sylvio asleep on board the next morning¬—
with a pile of bloody clothes on the deck
and a broken hand in a cast.
He jumped ship in Singapore.
Three years later he walked into base camp
with a low-grade fever and a monastery tan.
I take a sniper's stance at 2 -AM.
Blooded or bored, I haul back to bivouac by 8.
I follow a ridge road line of shell-shattered trees
down to a pontoon bridge
I downshift the motorcycle,
sliding through breaking slush of oil, ice,
the slip of troops in support.
Five helicopters in formation,
rocket pods painted as dragons, sharks, archangels
shadow the slow, snowy bend of the riverbank.
Razor wire rattles loosely on the perimeter rails.
The smell of biscuits, frying pork, chicory coffee fires the air,
as I catch sight of Sylvio serving in the mess line.
While I maneuver
through walking wounded, the whip of work details
soldiers snap to, averting their eyes.
A reputation precedes me:
I make my mark at night.