Nightmare Songs: 4

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4.

History loves its impossible martyrs,
their willingness to be aberrant and remembered
leads them onto crippled stairs without shoes
where they—blinded—must navigate the extant
grammar of vulnerability.
Some prisoners were executed by pike—
the other soldiers, unbloodied, were being prepared by this.
Morning coffee in the barracks—these became afternoons.
Hemingway imagining the terrorists as they enter the forsythia night
could never have foreseen their smaller victories:
the fishing trophy at five years old, the carved napkin ring.
These forgettable collections that become us
even as we throw them away or hand them down.
Our siblings and our children become reiterations
of design, of voice. What polyphony in this—
there are specters in the spaces between our digits.