Читать книгу The Quarry - Dan Lechay - Страница 10

Last Night

Last night I was happy, your white body beside me

breathing, the sheet rising and falling: why did I see,

just at the moment when sleep comes, the face

of poor Alan Gardner from high school, forgotten for twenty years?

It was your whiteness, the sheet rising and falling in the hot night,

that resurrected him, brought him back for a moment

from Viet Nam, disentangled from that tree

and the death that fluttered, briefly, in all the papers:

how, snagged on a branch, his parachute floated whitely,

it opened and closed like a huge and useless lung;

he screamed, and the machine guns tore him apart—

I woke with a small convulsion; he vanished, poor Alan,

spirited back to nothingness; and you were beside me, breathing.

We were still breathing.