Well, it seems that war has never come to an end
and we've taken over from the Germans fighting it ourselves.
And I tried to write a poem about the war in Vietnam
a couple of years ago and wouldn't come right
until I began writing about the war that I knew,
which is our war, same war.
The war, the aspect, in many different theaters--
Vietnam is only one.
And this poem is called "How much longer,"
which is the title I took from caption one of Goya's etchings,
Disasters of War.
"How much longer."
Let me find a newer version of it.
Day after day after day it goes on
and no one knows how to stop it or escape.
Friends come bearing some vague agony.
I hear our hopeless laughter.
I watch us drink.
War is in everyone's eyes.
War is made in the kitchen, in the bedroom,
in the car at stoplights.
A marriage collapses like a burning house
and the other houses smolder.
Old friends make their way in silence.
Students stare at their teachers and suddenly feel afraid.
The old people are terrified like cattle rolling their eyes
and bellowing while the young wonder in darkness, dazed,
half believing some half forgotten poem or else
come out with their hearts on fire alive in the last days.
Armed children roam the neighborhoods
with submachine guns, gas masks, and riot sticks.
Excavations are made in us and slowly we
are filled in with used up things.
Knives too dull to cut bread with,
bombs that failed to go off.
Cats smashed on the highway, slivers of soap, hair, gristle,
old TV sets that hum and stare out blindly like the insane.
Bridges kneel down.
The cities billow and plunge like horses and their smoke.
The tall buildings open their hysterical burning eyes
at night.
The leafy suburbs look up at the clouds and tremble.
And my wife leaves her bed before dawn walking the icy
pasture, shrieking her grief to the cows,
praying in tears to the softening blackness.
I hear her outside the window, crazed, inconsolable,
and go out to fetch her.
Yesterday she saw a photograph, Naomi, our little girl,
in a ditch, in Vietnam, half in the water.
The rest of her, beached on the mud, was horribly burned.