1.
Nevermind the haze
nesting in the valley.
Nevermind the tallest flag
by the river dimmed—
the woman will return home,
bragging how she alone
glimpsed a binocular flash
from a lookout’s shack—
how she saw his eyes
look once then
cut away while the river
buried the sky
a bit deeper.
2.
Here, the world ends,
she moans,
as a spindle of light
in the land-mined grass
bends and gulps like a heron.
Every tourist here is hawk-eyed,
cradles visions
in their blinking cameras:
curl of barbed wire,
nod of a bored soldier
thumbing through the day’s
instructions as
his loosened helmet
slips in the heat.
3.
She strains
to memorize the land
beyond him—
the other country
borderless below
a dismantled bridge—
somehow familiar
and yet like nothing before
or since; a hill is a hill
she thinks. The jackknifed
grass; everything bends
familiar. Once before
she has seen it, the place,
though not here,
where lands blurs
so near,
only the birds
carve through.