Down the track of a Philippine Island
We rode to the aircraft in trucks,
Going past an enclosure of women,
Those nurses from sick-tents,
With a fume of sand dust at our backs.
We leapt to the tail-gate,
And drew back, then,
From the guards of the trembling compound,
Where the nailed wire sang like a jew’s-harp,
And the women like prisoners paced.
In the dog-panting night-fighter climbing,
Held up between the engines like a child,
I rested my head on my hands;
The drained mask fell from my face.
I thought I could see
Through the dark and the heart-pulsing wire,
Their dungarees float to the floor,
And their light-worthy hair shake down
In curls and remarkable shapes
That the heads of men cannot grow,
And women stand deep in a ring
Of light, and whisper in panic unto us
To deliver them out
Of the circle of impotence, formed
As moonlight spins round a propeller,
Delicate, eternal, though roaring.
A man was suspended above them,
Outcrying the engines with lust.
He was carried away without damage,
And the women, inviolate, woke
In a cloud of gauze,
Overhearing the engines’ matched thunder.
Then, the voice of the man, inmixed,
Seemed to them reassuring, unbeard-of,
Passing out softly into the hush
Of napa-leaves, reeds, and the sea,
And the long wind up from the beaches,
All making the nets to be trembling
Purely around them,
And fading the desperate sound
To the whine of mosquitoes, turned back
By the powdery cloth that they slept in,
Not touching it, sleeping or waking,
With a thing, not even their hair.
The man sat away in the moonlight,
In a braced, iron, kingly chair,
As the engines labored
And carried him off like a child
To the west, and the thunderstruck mainland
It may have been the notion of a circle
Of light, or the sigh of the never-thumbed wire,
Or a cry with the shape of propellers,
Or the untouched and breath-trembling nets,
That led me later, at peace,
To shuck off my clothes
In a sickness of moonlight and patience,
With a tongue that cried low, like a jew’s-harp,
And a white gaze shimmered upon me
Like an earthless moon, as from women
Sleeping kept from themselves, and beyond me,
To sweat as I did, to the north:
To pray to a skylight of paper, and fall
On the enemy’s women
With intact and incredible love.
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