But Then Writing It Brave

But Then Writing It Is Brave                         

…Ink has it’s

own creature life, one drop a sudden

artery.

                        Marianne Boruch

                        “Chinese Brushwork”

Some days I don’t take it down

at all, only note it the way most things

are noted, a passing by, a surface

registering, a shift against the rhythm

of depth,  preventing it from sinking.

Maybe it’s because I’m on a kick

of resisting cliché, how quickly a habit

becomes that, like noting

the time of day at the exact same

time every day and mark it as coincidence

but not at all routine, a track

worn and worn like a road into

the woods where feet trample, trample

in utter visibility and safety.  It makes me

wonder about cowardice,

how a man suffers the training

from birth to battlefield and the nerve

is cut and he crawls away from it all,

heart open beneath his fatigues, so that

when he’s found, after the bombs

and bullets stop, they’ll see the hole,

they’ll wonder how he got this far

and if someone carried him and see

the snake of a trail his body made

and write the casual-

ty in, an almost bored redundancy

before moving to the next and the next

the flip of their legal notes thick with it.

Because they weren’t there they didn’t see

and couldn’t imagine the complete shock

slow motion puts on a body, so that a bullet

can seem like a bird who flew down

from a tree when the soldier was a boy

and sat and ate the seeds from the palm

of his hand.  I would have noticed

this.  Wouldn’t I?  Even if it happened

every day?  I’d hide and stop breathing

while the finch or cardinal dropped down.

I’d wait…it would bore into me and root

like no other thing could

simply because it was on the verge

of flying off, and, in leaving, open

wide, gush after gush, mine, his, red, red

capillary