Was it the rain so fine it was
invisible but forming on
the camera lens and lips that deafened
like the noise of history?
Forty-three years too late the tiny
village has its stone perfection
yet and the clock on the chapel
tells in timeless age its one
wrong time. And the steady downpour
weighs on the grass and hedgerows
and crisp road to where a hangar
holds its hogfeed mill and the runway’s
a dragstrip between brewery signs.
Beyond the mud and puddled turns,
old barracks and mess halls molder
in dripping woods, and here and there,
host to drunken vines, a rotting
signpost points toward motor pool
and control tower in the vast grid
of strips and turnarounds now lost
in flooding weeds, wind sock a rag
on its high ring, as though ten thousand
bombers had left on their missions
and forgotten where to return
in the green roaring shirelight still,
and the face of a dead uncle
stares up through piles of leaves at our
sentimental curiosity
for the last things he ever saw.
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