Field Trip
One child is repeated
by many other children
looking at the sky
with binoculars.
Behind us, the analog
stream of autumn. Followed
by a chain-link fence.
Followed by the slow
idea of starting
to run very far away.
A person with a basket
offers us three tiny flags
in the gut of
the field. One of them,
red with stripes,
I take. Two flags, later,
found in the basement
of a partially
constructed house. By
this time, it is
dark. The others
are gone. A permission slip
flutters, once, under
the stars—but it is
not my permission slip.
An Incident: Hallucination
This time, you are sleeping in the upstairs bedroom at the end of the hallway w/
the woods out the window the woods
You go to bed early, turning off all the lights & when you wake in middle of the night, the room
exactly as it was before, except for
now there is
a
woman hung
by her neck in the corner
of the dark room, dangling from the ceiling by a rope;
she
creaks she turns the air
Her gown is old, her hair is
wait
you see her face
Still
This photograph was taken in 1991: everyone lined up.
The field, us.
Repeat the photograph.
There is something that will not
hold still.
*
real rooms or portraits of rooms at the end of the hallway: room.
At the end of the hallway: hallway portrait of hallway.
*
For some reason the artillery did not fire, as if the Virginians were invisible . . .
Quick concussion of sunlight.
At night after the fighting, a ghost
wouldn’t know where to begin.
Tour
“We went through some woods, which were full of
dead bodies, and formed in line again.”
As toilsome I played near Virginia’s woods, my brothers
disappear into the bosky thicket.
“We found this bone in the creek”—brothers
“Too big to be a deer bone”—dad
This field was a scene of confusion.
What is this story now that my brother is dead?
My dead brother found a dead bone
at a soccer field near the battlegrounds?
Dead Ryan posted over alive Ryan in the memory/
Dead Ryan pasted over alive Ryan in the thought.
Is he smaller? Was he ever small?
Out of the woods behind you filed
fresh reinforcements.
The hallucinations begin when we move to Fairfax Station.
