BryanBorland.com

It begins
when my friend comes home from the war,
a line that feels wrong present tense,
the battles before saved for school books
and the far off stares of dying grandfathers,
seen in the weather-wrinkled trigger fingers
of aging uncles,
in yellow-paged poetry
with cadence rhythms in the distant behind,
in mythological terms like
foxhole or Vietnam or quadriplegic,
in inconceivable notions
like life before one’s own birth
or the amputation of a leg.

War was not something real to us,
my buddies, my classmates.
Desert Storm, even,
we didn’t flinch,
the landscape unaltered with
mouths agape in little-league patriotism
at the entertainment of cable news loops,
black and green gunfights unfolding like
sheets dirtied by approaching adulthood then
washed by mama
clean again.

Once-a-month weekend marches
paid for college and cars,
the military as touchable as plastic childhood figures melted on
Georgia summer dashboards
or lost like make believe as we became men,
but then the call came
and little brothers and sisters lined up,
dutiful teenage tanks of bone and flesh and gun,
we saluted them goodbye and they just
disappeared.

Some of us followed
or had gone in the early days,
as weeks stretched into oceans
and aircraft carriers left and returned,
sometimes heavier with guilt or pride,
sometimes lightened by one less solider,

one hundred less soldiers,

four thousand less soldiers.

When my friend comes home from the war,
when they all come home from the war,
when he’s debriefed and declassified,
when he’s given directions to the VA and
diagnosed a survivor,
when afterwards he sits with me at the bar,
sandscars hidden by civilian clothes,
an invisible flag draped over
shoulders forced broad and muscular,
I recognize the same unseen grip
squeezing silence into his throat,
the same stare of my grandfather in his screaming eyes,

so we drink
and toast his return with round after round,
laugh at jokes but don’t speak of where he goes
in the punishing seconds between stories,
between step and blast or
life and death.
We don’t acknowledge how his hands shiver in
nighttime deserts of collateral memory.
We pretend not to notice the changes,
the explosions of epiphany that come,
how now we understand
the chill of winter
and war’s lingering moan.