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by Collier Nogues
EXAMINATION AND DISCOVERY
ALL things
being now decided by a general,
we were to correct our reader.
At daybreak we got under weigh
and discovered we were to mark
in a straight line
the centre of the passage:
it was necessary to keep always
to-gether; the required marks
were to teach us our future.
We proceeded
at once to mark when shown where.
Next morning we again entered with
our ink smooth as glass:
our certainty
of what to cover advancing,
studded over
with numerous small islands of
safe answer,
a ditch on each side, connected by
a trelliswork of black.
We looked out for sharply
the appearance of little knives in
the folds of their orders
and denied any knowledge of war. A BOOK OF PATRIOTIC MOVEMENTS
I.
Was a person to act as though dying
had become mere?
A kill
was expected of me.
However great a man appeared
leaping form
determined form
the clear bright form
the sound running underneath was
the close press of bees
carried out
by the hand of a form the same as his.
II.
During the heat and clouds and dis-
regard
the centre was formed with
At the same time, was formed by
collected,
was formed,
showing the hand more and more un-
disguised,
the dark loud movements of war.
I stepped
into the field of movement and began
to turn
I had stepped into the field.
III.
In front of the house was matter,
suspended. In a central position re-
mained a leg.
There was a suspended hand,
the other hand,
the leg upon a post
leaf by leaf, making a form apart from
their movements,
a form themselves
a sum
of men who had leapt into the
field.
IV.
I was
the already formed approach of
f o r c e
the nothing left but
not
V.
The road at early dawn is still here—
I am in the future.
I move my hand
to raise its flag
in the yard. The
quietness
on the surface is breaking
bringing about the form of a person
the nation in
his ear.
Author's note: This poem is from a series of erasures about the Pacific War. Each poem begins as a historical document, and I remove most of the words, using the ones that are left to make the poem. This one erases a document chronicling the radical right-wing pro-military movements in Japan in 1936. It has become a poem in the voice of a soldier, recounting what it’s like to be asked to kill for one’s country, and what it’s like to transform into someone capable of doing that. The poem is a response to and a negation of the militarism and greed for power which animated the original document. |
