Family Scene: Young Vet and Relatives

He will smile and corroborate the evidence
as quickly as the expensive magazines
that tell him weekly what he wants or knows.
He will speak dramatically like a correspondent
of his secret and meaningful time on the movie islands,
among statistics of perfection and foxholes
and no atheists and the great tropism to where he
is sitting so happily and so contented now.

Then he will callously repeat his notions
from their lips, his life ambition and politer
lusts, play back the phonograph of their belief,
while in the closet his overcoat is hung,
ready and fixed in the shape of his shoulders;
while he hears, if he stops dead for a moment,
the hate hawked on every corner of his suburb
and the sound of the gun he thought silent.
And as his name is called from the safe room
he will be arming for struggle and warning himself
of what is to come, where he can go to meet it,
of what is here already, tapping on the window
as he seats a tipsy aunt at dinner.