Like Susan Rothenberg's horses, the image
of the thing becomes the thing itself.
Like patterns of plaid, etched into an arm along
the Nagasaki River, the echo forms
a pool as deep as flood tide surging
through a bevel on the sea. Here,
the lime-parched heather has been hell
and haven to worker ants that tramp
and trellis mountainsides beside the Somme,
where sourgrass flattens and dies
in the imprint of a soldier, true to his vows
of one last cigarette, as enemy flares
streak the night sky. The weight
of his body, pressed into sod, seems almost
Paleozoic by contrast with our own,
when we're flung straight out into air.
Like a child who lies in newly-fallen
snow, he stretches his arms now, salutes
and kicks his heels, wands with his spindly
limbs the wings that take him farther,
farther than we ever want to go.

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