From fellow journalist, fan of veterans, and shared animus-mundi-ite Chris Lombardi, over at Incredible Panic Rules, a stupendous fragment of poetry, from fellow Harvardian Adrienne Rich, which communicates much of what veterans go through, when they look back in anguish, and try to make some sense of their experience of combat trauma:
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.
"The thing I came for, the wreck and not the story of the wreck," indeed.
