Right across the Chena River is an Army post.
And I just read in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
that three more members of the Stryker Brigade
will not be coming home.
And the young man in this poem will
have to play his horn again and again and again.
It's called "Bugler, Fort Wainwright, Alaska."
"Yellow leaves in July.
Damn!
A single osprey banks over birches,
cruises upriver and down.
Birch bark splits like the lip of the bugler hitting
a high note the morning after Tiffany
with a tongue like a mouthful of tadpoles
and a hard hat she neglected to mention.
Gashed knuckles-- he pictures a nicotine chip.
His tooth stuck in an itchy keloid baptized with blood.
No field worker with a short-handled hoe
ever had a back that hurt this bad.
Each vertebra burnished by fire, each bone a glowing coal,
ruby spine searing inside him.
His breath sinks in and in and in, shriek held back.
Forced through brass, his pain ices
over echoed notes of taps."