Hurtgen, 28 Nov 1944
Joseph Tate
A dense German forest
a cold Winter night
a foxhole, a boom and you’re
out like a—
I.
(Forest a black-iron furnace gone cold,
the valley mud-puddled with melting snow, ash, and urine;
hot shrapnel howling sparks through dark twined treetops,
burning lines through branches, trunks
shuddered into serrate splinters, green
wood hissing pops of blue heat)
That medic man says to me: O man, O boy—howd you end up
here (he points at my foot a few feet away) and there?
Well I was hunky-dory, hunkered down shoulders-to-ears in a
foxhole when a potato masher rolled in the hole and
II.
(a potato masher, a
Stielhand- [Stiel meaning
stalk and/or stick, meaning wood
handle for a Handgranate (HAHNT-gra-na-ta)
meaning trinitrotoluene in a tin metal cap.
] granate [“grenade” from granatum, Cf. pomegranate,
see also garnet, see also the snow
red with blood)
III.
and like a rabbit I lept up, but not quite out,
one lucky foot left in
when a locomotive boom of white light
scattered the night into fidgets of reds and greens and
scatter-shook my ears, them ringing nongoddamnstop like a
pinprick peal of bell metal, a thin silver
filament of noise, and
and next I knowd I was out like a
IV.
(sunlight, it is the season of red shoulders, skin salty from itself,
eyes clenched closed, reblooming azaleas wild white
and pink, tall pines weeping chalkwhite resin and
crackdry branch tips droop in black spindles)
like when my finger felt its belly for the bullet, that rabbit’s
ribcage pounding in fresh
pain, lucky foot twisted in woodbine bramble, brindle
fur sparkling with urine in a sunbeam and I
V.
wake to he’s waking me / he’s feeling
my leg for lead fragments, compacting rock-flecked
snow and sulfa powder ice-tight around tendon, tissue and
bone, as frost drips from the firs and a
skylark starts its click-stutter loop of
morning chirrups.
I end up evacuated down the single-lane firebreak track
past saplings in nursery rows reaching up from the
shadows of tree wells, past blankets draped over
frozeblue bodies, olivedrab wool
soaked blackcherry red,
and I said
O boy, O man, howd this man, howd that boy, O
Lord, how does anyone end up here.
Joseph Tate’s poems and multimedia work have appeared in Measure, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Euphony, The Found Poetry Review, The Kudzu Review, E·ratio, Yemassee and other publications. He has published and lectured on Radiohead, Shakespeare and prosody.