The Sleeping Wall

Jane M. Downs
4
Their world at Huett. Blue flowers in September. Dawn against a dusty window. Sometimes,
she disappears into the trees. His classes at college. Dizzy. Bereft. Words pulse with
history’s stories of catastrophe, love, blindness. The meadow crossed. The broken wall.
They watch constellations open over the lake.
He saw the soldier race across the field, head down, feet barely touching the ground. Someone
shot him in mid-flight and then they were all around him, stripping his body down to the injured
flesh.
It is the dream of Medina that captures him. The cadence of her thought, her pulse, the
metronome that was her mother’s. He is lost in her body. She wraps him in her hair.
Jungle dripping with heat. Vines coiled between branches. He kneels over the corpse. Hears the
jungle behind him as if it were thinking, trying to speak.
Scorched village. They dig where the huts were. Broken dishes, pots, a doll, a wooden horse.
Bones. The closer they get to the bones the more they swear and joke. One puts on a helmet
encrusted with blood.
She collects feathers. Dead bees in a bowl. An empty mud wasp nest. Presses leaves between
sheets of waxed paper. He watches her move beneath the burning autumn sky.
Memory, a movie playing frame by frame.
Broken Buddha on a fence post. A cross hung around a neck. Soldier praying inside a foxhole. A
woman kneels to kiss the ground. Thunder. A couple makes love after a funeral.
5
Now, he can’t stop remembering the mud and rain, everything suspended in dense light.
The scorching Vietnam sun. No wind. Rows of body bags, temporary graves. How he
held a cigarette to the lips of a soldier without hands. Now, he has a quiet place where he
can reach into his books for answers. A place where it is possible to imagine a future. Yet,
watching his sons run along the path to the lake, Medina behind them, her hair a shower
of black, he wonders what they are running to.
Always restlessness, always the need to ease it. How lovely her eyes are at dusk. And the
children’s, too. Ice cubes gleaming in a glass. Gin cool in his mouth.
• 22 •