Pine thicket at the edge of a clearing:
I squatted with my back against a tree
and cradled in my lap the Enfield carbine,
a pawnshop gun, not terribly accurate,
but terrible and accurate enough,
a jungle weapon designed for use in Burma.
Under black branches I knew were green
as money, I hefted its weight,
checked night vision through peep sight
and saw over the dull gleam
of the cone-shaped flash suppressor
the field where Florida sand boiled up
like smoke and fireflies snapped off
against the far border of trees.
Inside those trees a truck sat under a canopy
of low branches, and around that canopy
Cubans hid and listened for a voice
on the two-way radio.
I listened for an owl
to call again from the pines dissolving
into glades behind me, for the voices
of tree frogs to blur toward a monkey-laugh
riddling the trees of Burma, for wind
to crackle like brush under boots,
and felt in my heart a weakness like malaria,
which I knew was only the shaking
of nerves, like the tips of my fingers
caressing the scars on the Enfield,
tracing crude letters of the one deep scar
that was the name the soldier Lowry
had carved into his stock.
From the sky
came the first sign, a far-off, insect drone
of an engine buzzing the dark above
the southern horizon, then a burst of light
stringing the edges of the field
and the air-strip glowing in the forest
like a flesh wound. I found my hands close
around the rifle as the droning grew loud
and twin props swept tree-level and were gone,
leaving only a wake in the pinetops
and a blown field of wrapped bales hitting
between the strands of light
and rolling in the sand like paratroops.
In the darkness of snuffed lanterns,
I stood in a silence awaiting all-clear,
wondered what I might do if a floodlight
of the law should jar from the trees.
I tapped the magazine, thought of Lowry
killed and buried in Burma,
or live, perhaps, with family in England,
his retirement and his life closing in,
and how on other nights
he sat listening in a jungle for Japs,
how silence made him as jumpy as noise
and nerves edged a name in his stock.
Rendezvous: Belle Glade
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