He Considers the Witness Appearing

My friend, I could tell you how much of my life
has been buried here—
the nights and the days like wastes ever-extending
under this numb, air-conditioned sky.
Here words get worked hard,
as gum in a coach’s mouth, wrung like a towel.
Like water, they flow to the shape of anything.
Here every word shades another,
leaf masking leaf. More than you know,
my friend, this is no place for you,
you are farther from home
than on any of your sweating postings.

And you sit in front of me and say you did not,
“Absolutely, yes sir. Absolutely, I did not.”
We must not be speaking the same language!
Look! I have sat as you do now and prayed
the unfortunate honesty of the body not betray
me. I know how strange can be the sounds
that come out of the mouth—like snakes,
like a pentecostalist’s offering. So, take care.
A question is like a rotting log. A spider is poised
there on your skin should you even perspire!

My cocksure, lost friend! Your wooden-porch speech,
the screen door snap shut of it, the quick-to-burr defiance
in the strung-out wire of your voice, your toffee-apple piety,
the resort to a gaunt honesty that’s true and an affectation.
“Like us all, I did ’s I’s told. We all did.”
It’s good, it works. There’s enough colour in that
for the tv news. Their peg: Back-country.
No son, you ain’t bein’ crucified—you just ain’t that interesting.
Think of those big rigs out there in your wide Iowa,
they take it all, gatherin’ it in like the preacher says.
You’re being processed, like McDonalds, ground beef, grey pulp.

We come to this room from oh, so different lives,
now joined, face-to-face, not ten yards from one another:
—how much slighter you are in the flesh!
If I close my eyes what image of you etches in?
The fading acne scars, a sullen skin that expected nothing better,
the earnestness, the decency of a store-clerk, “Yes sir. Yes. No sir
I did not. I swear”, who needs to be liked, who wants a girl.
Your record is fine: “There is no malice in this man.
He is a team player.” I believe it.
Whatever your knowledge, the truth, your guilt,
however you justify it—the heat, those faces, the provocation,
homesickness, sick, bone-sick, heart-sick
of the whole damn thing, zeal or any other drug,
does it matter now? Would it if you were innocent?

You and I here today we kind of dance,
like the eddy and swirl on the same reach of water,
pinned as curious unions are
—the sex goddess and her dowdy mate,
the murderer and the one he’s chosen,
power circling the powerless.
But when we separate I disappear behind
one of these doors, back in among the amoral snow
and innocent machinery of words.

And you? You too will disappear, become a name,
a synonym bundling up an era, folded among transcripts
in the archives.
You, that figure in that clumsy video.

But always there will be
those first hot-sour mashed moments
of that still afternoon, and afterwards,
smoke drifting across newly-green rice fields
like someone crying
and all through a stunned valley,
always, like water babbling, the sound of kids
let freshly out of school.

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