Poem of a Soldier's Wife.

Poem of a Soldier's Wife

   Your letter through the slot
   slid to the floor and lay quite still
   all day, until returning home from work
   I seized and tore it open.
   Then the prize of your life,
   squeezed into the pen's dark lines,
   lit the dimming kitchen, where
   hands shaking, I rustled the thin paper
   to begin your resurrection.

   Though it's too hot to think, I think
   of the reels we danced to and my childhood dog
   as often as I imagine my death.
   It's enough to have a little faith. Courage
   is too much to ask, I'd settle for a good sleep.
   My love, how not to crave oblivion,
   even now, with only heat and sour fear
   to kill me? Though come tomorrow
   or come Wednesday, I may be a killer
   when I'd planned to fiddle in blue-grass!
   Waiting for war, we are humming
   and playing cards, and the dry,
   cracked-mud landscape opens
   farther and farther around us,
   as if some drab eternity has swallowed us.
   Soon, this week, or the next, the army
   will say go, and we will go, though
   my friend cracked up before a shot was fired.

   Fleshed in each line, you walked
   the white pages, though I killed you
   in my mind a thousand times:
   planted bullets in your torso,
   lit your hair on fire, sent gas
   whistling through your pipes.

   Oh miracle! Oh poem.
   Oh odd, tight-lipped rejoicing.
   In the hot, dry breath of death
   you've packed your life
   into an envelope and escaped
   to me and to this plain, Midwestern house
   where I, the dullest of apostles,
   join your illicit alliance late
   to offer this to you,
   my desert Lazarus, to your reluctant resilience,
   and to our savior, Christ, the Word.

Amanda Rogers teaches at Bryn Athyn College in Pennsylvania and directs a small nonprofit that provides homes for street kids in Kathmandu, Nepal.