—physicist; b. 1922; wounded,

battle for Bastogne, 1944; d. 2009.

1.

The stretcher strapped to the jeep, calling

upon the branch-scraped moon, his wife’s

sorrel eyes speckled in slate shadow

across his sight, her hand tendrilled upon

his shoulder, Billy’d felt the sizzled sting

bristle in his left delt, the bullet slitting

along the humerus. Antimony, bled

from earth’s marrow then bonded to lead,

now settled into its six-decade journey

to the top of the world. He saw it all

in 4D. Just as he saw through the smoke’s

seething buzz his own bullet pierce

the laminae of an instantly halved face.

His wife’s touch atomized, the sudden

needle in his arm hoisted the inner walls

of a primitive dark: Such bile

from his own bone and circuit, German

eyes at twenty yards clear and impassable

as his own hate, channeled so precisely

into a single squeeze of trigger,

bullet at the speed of terminus. Every

velocitous atom is a field in a field.

In twilight Billy saw eonic pressures

crush granules into elemental blends,

a bucked marriage of strata—and, within

the spent split stuff of eras, two arid

matters fused for war, their atoms

wide as the distances between planets,

passing through the body’s marrow,

infinite passages regnant with ylem—

2.

Galvanic pith, Billy’s lightspeed mind

vast as the dome of that planetarium

he’d dreamed homeward with him as a kid,

his churchy notions suddenly as bound

as those stories cut onto stained glass—

Then the secret music of the spheres, alone,

Holst’s Neptune on the record player. Then

his parents shouldering him out the door

to kneel for communion nine first Fridays

in a row so to guarantee God’s heaven.

(A folkloric promise nonetheless held

like placebo.) And later, night-reading

by flashlight the book from Father Ryan

who promised him: It’s true: Me. You. We’re

on a journey to a god we won’t recognize.

Billy aching for the smarts to be goodness.

Billy as a young man lit by the urgency

of stars. Billy aching for dispersion

beneath touch. Pain-free Billy, air-borne—

3.

Dear Love, Though the tent lights are out,

I can see you backlit on the slope above

Felt Lake where winter floods the field,

where we stooped to drink from bowled

hands, where you said I was the only

version of me you’d ever met, your eyes

in half-smile awaiting my response. You

never told me to snub this call-to-arms.

You worried I’d be stuck to atomic laws

deciding who I’d be, not hearing the sub-

material waves breaking from the harsh

sequencing of then-this-must-be. Are we

fated together, or did we choose each

other? —Or maybe both, the way the new

science has married the old? It happens

I was hit days back, Love. Not to worry—

"modest wound in non-dominant arm”

wrote my Belgian nurse. I write to you

from the outer ward of the field tent.

Nurse says it’s in too deep, they can’t cut

the shard out. Missed vessel and bone.

(Remember dear accented Dr. Bloch

droning on about antimony and lead?)

Nurse claims it will sleep forever in there,

that I’ll be back to the boys soon. Funny,

when the drugs wane, I feel as if the thing

lives, crossed over from a beta world

to instruct me. I keep looking up, as if

I’m still afloat in the Medic’s jeep.

Is that us dispersed in heady love

above Jasper Ridge, flirting after class

in debate over Schrodinger’s feline?

I need to be worthy of your thoughts.

(Is that my old voice, your lapsed Catholic?)

Look: I’m holding you in space, your long

fingers tracing the stars of Pegasus. Do you

feel its flung neutrinos passing through

our hearts? As sun sets on Skyline, let’s

listen together for the carillon bells. —B

4.

Billy thinking road flight’s not so bad—

till dirt ruts jut the wheels, the bounce

and slam, the syrette of morphine now

failing the slashed ganglia. Sergeant Medic

stopples the wound again, when at last

in the tented ER the coronal lights

above him fade to orbiting the vase

of a single hibiscus in sudden bloom. Where

do we go when we die without dying?

Billy sees the German aim and squeeze out

the bullet at the instant he too lets loose

the sure-to-be-off-target shot that passes

in flight so unlikely near its brother,

how in that lab class we’d witnessed

the Bernoulli effect shift each path

of passing objects, here both yawing

the other a few mortal degrees, now

the death-sure cartridge deflected

from heart to arm, his own shot

veered through the man’s left superioris.

How could he see so precisely? Is this

the animalia of dodge and fight,

his bayonet always click-loaded

in the dark? Can he think his way back

into reverie? Truth is, dread abides.

Did the man’s head fissure in two?

Must he continue to force its cleaving

even now en route to sleep? A fright

he must atomize in deference to another

question, the one forever offering

transport to the inexplicable, so immense

yet infinitesimal as Planck’s length.

But yet again, the two worries converge.

The easier: How can a human be a field?

Then, the sin he’d wish away: How can

this body’s field justify such animus?

Or: What is it to be worthy? In a husk

of thirst, a new IV returns the nearness

of a young wife near The Bay, she, too,

lavish with immeasurable distances—

5.

Now, in the linear slip of sixty years,

the gossamer scalp yields to the scalpel,

and the sliver of cartridge ascends

into the light, gold courier on the thin

tip of the surgeon’s raised forceps.

—Billy in time’s anesthesiac twilight

floating before a white-haired prof

who leads him below the lit surface

of the world, how the warp of space

holds the field in its temporal grip. Far off,

the high-frequency siren of headache

fades. Like that, the classroom reforms

as the grave Billy visits so often these years—

there the mourners, there the priests.

Then he’s gravity-free in the night sky

where she’s wobbling, like him, afloat

before the slate-shadowed moon, her

auric gaze lovely as a quantum breeze.

When he comes to, the doc admits surprise,

how without prediction a shard of bullet

rose in its path until… ⎯Until

it was ready to blossom, thinks Billy,

from the riddled compactions of earth

to quark-filled air, a thing dispersed

into its next arrangement, one bullet’s

intimate impermanence, all these years

after Bastogne’s swarm of gunshot aerated

the smoking noise. So, we effloresce

into informed unknowing—of that,

Billy’s certain. Our gift, the succor

of the unseeable. Time loops and loops,

a redundant dream in which one man

is instantly vanished by another,

and a woman chooses to lean down

in mercy out of inestimable space

to breathe into Billy’s cupped hands.