Behind the Old Soldiers’ Hospital

Steam banks chugging out the brick autoclave

under the laundry room, screams rising up chutes

while the sergeant’s leg is sawed off above the long sock.

The clock is a black box with lipstick

on it: not awake,

I throw Bill Knotts’ last volume

at it . . . two bogies, then, at three o’clock?

a small chinaman and a woman in a white dress

watch the blossoming

hand grenades like running buffalo

whose legs have gone out

under them— dead almost,

eating the sudden shifting geysers of dirt

that circling Cree ponies drift through, invisible

in the mind of a dry old woman,

all colors fading for her

like the smell of her daughter’s urine—

the buffalo meet, pyrite crystals

of hashed fruit.

                       goddamn comma Bill comma but

when I read you

I dream as guilty as Lincoln, at midsummer,

out in the copse yard in the cooling suburbs

of Washington.