Unit 649 Samos

Father, your image clings to the mountainside in this half-morning while the tired soldiers sleep. Dust of the trampled field, dust rising from the tracks of Steyers in manic traverse. It is hard sometimes, being a man. I would like to fall into the purple light like a child, like the star that rolled with its lucent teardrop straight across Cassiopeia and drowned in the east Aegean. You would understand this strange, cinematic landscape. You too stood guard on such dark horizons, counting days while some magic woman quietly buried your heart. Silence falls silken on these windswept barracks. Desolate steel, dirt--- the hourglass slips. Memories fail, eyes flutter where the void swings open like a leaning gate. Look out across the charred mountains, the sky stretching to where the mind is useless anyway. The flash of Turkey in the distance, the crippled trees staggered on the ridge's blade, surprise me every morning when the sun rides up the back of Mt. Karvouni and leaps out white-hot with a violence. I have seen every sunrise and sunset for ninety days. Dust coats my eyelids. My iris glints like the barrel of my gun. I am no soldier--- when I guard, I guard the stars. When I march, I march for the sad music of these hills, for joy.

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