Five O'clock, January 2003
Tonight as cargoes of my young
�fellow countrymen and women are being hauled
�into positions aimed at death, positions
�they who did not will it suddenly
�have to assume
�I am thinking of Ed Azevedo
�half-awake in recovery
�if he has his arm whole
�and how much pain he must bear
�under the drugs
�On cliffs above a beach
�luxuriant in low tide after storms
�littered with driftwood hurled and piled and
�humanly arranged in fantastic
�installations and beyond
�silk-blue and onion-silver-skinned
�Jeffers’ “most glorious creature on earth”
�we passed, greeting, I saw his arm
�bandaged to the elbow
�asked and he told me: It was just
�a small cut, nothing, on the hand he’d
�washed in peroxide thinking
�that was it until the pain began
�traveling up his arm
�and then the antibiotics the splint the
�numbing drugs the sick sensation
�and this evening at five o’clock the emergency
�surgery and last summer
�the train from Czechoslovakia to Spain
�with his girl, cheap wine, bread and cheese
�room with a balcony, ocean like this
�nobody asking for pay in advance
�kindness of foreigners
�in that country, sick sensation now
�needing to sit in his brother’s truck again
�even the accident on the motorcycle
�was nothing like this
�I’ll be thinking of you at five
�this evening I said
�afterward you’ll feel better, your body
�will be clean of this poison
�I didn’t say Your war is here
�but could you have believed
�that from a small thing infection
�would crawl through the blood
�and the enormous ruffled shine
�of an ocean wouldn’t tell you.
�
—2003
�
�
