At five o’clock I saw the sergeant slouch
Out of the guardroom, fumble for the shack
Where trusties laid a new latrine, and crouch
Close to the window, shuddering his back.
The weapons carrier slept on mushy tires.
Somebody screamed awake, lashed in a whirl
Of dreams, and nuzzled back to his desires:
Sipping his ideal whiskey with a girl;
Out on a beach somewhere he ran, the palms
Dulling the light, the breakers muffing sound;
Old women in kimonos rubbed his arms,
A bareback lady carried him around.
When the dawn stung me more alert, I saw
Another soldier heaving round his bed,
Twisting, high up in clutches of the raw
And empty ecstasy that shakes the dead
And the alone. So everybody slept,
Even the sergeant padding in the door.
But under the white streak of dawn I kept
My wakefulness. Barefoot across the floor
I shivered to the window in the light,
Forcing my eyelids open with my hands,
Leaping in terror from the blind delight
Of soldiers dreaming. Up the rutted sands
Outside, an old man flayed alive with cold
Plucked in the fog for cigarettes. Yet I
Remember him awake, though sick and old,
Waving his arms beneath the falling sky,
Sick of the dawn but kicking it awake,
Old on the earth but living on it now,
Slapping his skinny shoulder for the sake
Of life, the shadow in the fog somehow
Shaken into flesh. Quick in the light, I tore
Over the bundled soldiers, broke the latch
And, wrapping on a jacket at the door,
Ran to the man and offered him a match.
For all he knew, the soldiers in the gray
Barracks were dead. And so I knew they were,
As I rose up, moulting the dark away,
Laughing good-morning to the live man there.