Before the Wars.

Hutchinson, Chris

Before the Wars

   From behind the bowls of flame-Coloured
   apples, we watch soldiers
   Return as poets--nails bitten to half moons
   Faces flattened with what happens
   When a single memory holds intuition
   By the throat. The service is terrible, our waitress
   Bellicose. Because paying for bayonets to sprout
   From the tip of each dull syllable feels
   Worse than the night the cafe burned and
   Our plastic curios were all satanically
   Transmogrified, we excuse ourselves
   To the Everglades, abandon our children
   To the atavistic tide. This story is a trick
   Of vision, swinging on its hinge like
   The paperclip our analyst once used to fix
   His fashionable glasses. We go back
   To the year thermal lifts gave the dirigibles
   The power to burst the hearts of all citizens
   Born in exiguous rooms--brighter
   Than clouds those airships were cocoon sacs
   Of the lower heavens. Then hope fell to delirium
   Tremens. Then a gold-toothed Theosophist
   Stumbled on crayfish shells in the cloistral bays
   Of the afterlife. Slanting his brow to the swallows
   Darting like needle and thread just inches
   Above the tree line, living on apples
   And spitting out seeds like the dark
   Eyes of birds, he was once our image
   Of sweetness and light--before the wars
   Removed all traces of his name.