Song for Night

Dawn Is Two Hands Parting before the Face

Morning arrives in a shout, parting the protective cover of leaves as surely as a hand. I blink and wipe at my eyes furiously. Time is like that here. No gradual change, no softening of the light or gentle graying of night. Instead everything happens rudely, at once: like this war. I stretch carefully so as not to fall out of my perch. My trained eyes scan the terrain, ascertaining very quickly that it is safe. I scramble down. It is a quiet morning, no sound of gunfire, only birdsong and the landscape, the grass flowing like a green mossy carpet from where I stand at the edge of the forest down to the river. But then the war intrudes again: floating past in the river like a macabre regatta is a cluster of corpses. Riding them like barges, and breakfasting at the same time, are a bunch of vultures. I light a cigarette and scratch my belly. Time to move on, maybe catch breakfast on the way. I know to go against the flow of the bodies. They are washing downstream from the killing zone — a town, judging from the number of bodies in the water. I set off.

Life and death are like this river, Grandfather said. You can go anywhere on its spread as long as you don’t try to stop or alter the river’s course. But he was wrong. I have cheated death’s course many times and I am still here, like an undercurrent, full of a hate dark as any undertow.