Soldier's Heart

Soldier's Heart

On the Approximate Ten Year Anniversary
of the Death of my Student 


Question:  What's the distance between
conception and death?  And how long
before the canopy is brushed aside,
marked with finality?

Maybe we mark days to prove
they even happened at all: squares
of thirty, thirty one, and the odd
twenty eight or nine if it divides
evenly though I forget just now
the rule.

And maybe, so we don't lose it,
there's a mental glue, some umbilical
in the fetus seed (can I call it that?)
stretching out for the solid wall.
Conception dates are guess work:
Do you remember when you had your last 
period?   Only if there's a calendar
on the wall will I see are perfect
February squares. But I still
do not know. 

Only it was a Tuesday.  Or was it
a Wednesday?  The afternoon when
Justin crawled under his truck
and squirmed for that wrench
and with a quick kicked grip of the floor
his lift was just enough to settle it all,
axle right across his lungs when it fell.

It was.  And I mark it now.  Ten years
ago.  The date's the same, even if it blurs
for me.  And he'll never age.

Sweet boy, I want to say.  You go out and my own
would come in just nine months
later.  We were reading Soldier's Heart,
you and I, by Gary Paulsen.  Hearts,
all those civil hearts in boxes of sorrow.

It's hard to imagine the acres you've marched since.
Maybe their distance is the time it takes
to fall to the ground, to sit at the patch of grass
above your urn.  Maybe it's the last period
entirely before the final pause, your mother
somehow, the small room

of her womb, or its scar if it's been
removed.  Or me, these past ten years,
seeing you in the oddest places: faces
my son makes when he's content,
or when the world he's carrying
has been lifted from him for a moment,

long enough to breathe.