The war ends.  The lines of women push

tiny husbands in strollers past storefronts

of unravelled bandage and smoking cameras.

I want you to understand that I love

nothing about them.  It is nothing like love

but only an indistinct, sobbing hunger

for displacement that leads me to go some distance

beside them, into the archives, into the smoke.

Something teaches us to be hungry.

I think it is the same thing that makes pity

rise up in the lovely fall weather

like my own tears in the narrow channel

of the scar across my wife’s belly.  Tears,

displaced persons, and leaves flooding a scar.

In the post-war era, the change of the seasons

wheels us sobbing into the archives

hungry to be elsewhere and to pity

whomever the smoking cameras find there.

When things were darkest, it was the height of summer.

My wife decided to return to face

the deluge in her own house and her own bed.

The days stank of heat and pavement.  Every night

more men were dressed as babies and wheeled away.

In her own bed, my wife pressed me like a bandage

across her belly where the skin ceased and the summer

burned itself finally out as the war ended.

At the beginning of the lovely fall weather

I stood up and wept into the scar I had made.

My wife bundled me into a stroller

and turned me over to another woman

who pushed me along until the cameras stopped

and I was myself again among the red leaves

in the narrow channel of a new freedom.

I want you to understand I do not love

stories or the irregular toyscape where

I spent the war.  Understand I am all one

sobbing hunger.  I have starved a wife

out of her house, out of her own skin.

She bundled me into a stroller.

She will not help me to say something useful

about freedom, how great suffering is its vanguard

and new infancy.  She will not go even

that far into the smoke.  I was turned over

to strangers and stood up only when the last

storefront had rolled by and history taken

the turning into winter and the post-war.

In stateless autumn, in the smoke of no cameras,

freedom reddens into pity and dies on trees.