WEBVTT

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Right across the Chena
River is an Army post.

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And I just read in the
Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

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that three more members
of the Stryker Brigade

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will not be coming home.

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And the young man
in this poem will

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have to play his horn
again and again and again.

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It's called "Bugler,
Fort Wainwright, Alaska."

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"Yellow leaves in July.

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Damn!

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A single osprey
banks over birches,

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cruises upriver and down.

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Birch bark splits like the
lip of the bugler hitting

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a high note the
morning after Tiffany

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with a tongue like a
mouthful of tadpoles

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and a hard hat she
neglected to mention.

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Gashed knuckles-- he
pictures a nicotine chip.

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His tooth stuck in an itchy
keloid baptized with blood.

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No field worker with
a short-handled hoe

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ever had a back
that hurt this bad.

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Each vertebra burnished by
fire, each bone a glowing coal,

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ruby spine searing inside him.

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His breath sinks in and in
and in, shriek held back.

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Forced through
brass, his pain ices

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over echoed notes of taps."

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