Adrienne Rich — Five OClock 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