Tim Hunt

The Dark Mirror

In the story the others tell it was ’Nam that changed you,
twisted you,
into something you hadn’t been before:

night patrol and the slight rustling of leaves
that might be a sniper as the dark whispers to itself,
or to you, or nothing,

as you keep thinking of yourself back home
in the almost dawn, watching
where the manzanita opens to the creek,

waiting for the deer, a buck, to appear,
but as if you are the buck, sensing
or not sensing a presence.

Or waking the morning after another raid
Pacifying a village, still smelling
the burning huts, the burning bodies

that a moment before were Viet Cong
or maybe farmers or maybe children,
who’s to tell. 

Or the pinging of the rifle rounds
as you listen, hard, for the sound
of the choppers to break through—

air support, a way out, and another chance
to dull the edgy emptiness at the comfort club
where the slender girls pretend to understand

what you say, and sometimes you tell them
you love them, and sometimes you don’t,
but they already know the lie of both

as they take you behind the thin curtain.

That’s the story the others tell. 
And want to believe. 
But that wasn’t your ’Nam. 

Yours: supervising the teams loading bombs—
the hanger’s shade and the jungle
lush beyond the tarmac

and at day’s end, the Officer’s Club—
that almost orderly world
when the war was still an engagement.

But maybe in this story, your story, ’Nam
was still part of the twisting,
but differently so. 

Not like stepping on a mine—the weltered scars,
percocet and cane.  Or the need to forget
what cannot be forgotten,

or forgive what cannot be forgiven
as you ask Jesus
and sometimes pretend he does,

though you know he can’t. 

More the moon leaning on the windowsill
those nights in quarters as you listen
to the choppers bringing in the stretchers

like slow waves up a distant beach,
then fading back into the night’s static
that you’ve come to hear as a silence,

and so you offer to buy the moon a drink,
but when you look again,
the dark window is an empty mirror,

and you want to turn away
but cannot
because you are floating in an emptiness

that is neither order nor disorder,
as the silence whispers that nothing
is forbidden

and so only the forbidden
is real
enough to matter.

And later you cannot tell
whether this was something done to you
or a revelation too sacred to share

but know that this cannot be forgotten
or forgiven. 
Only embraced. 

And you know this just as you know
the others must tell themselves
some other story as you watch them

mumble their beads through their fingers
believing they understand,
as you pretend you do not hear them. 

Or care.

And you do not care, because the emptiness
they believe they know
is not the emptiness you know. 

And in the dark mirror beyond the thin curtain,
there is neither order nor disorder
and all stories are the same.

In your story only the forbidden
is real—the memory of it, the desire
of it, and the shame that is not shame.

And in that emptiness you are real—
damned and redeemed
in the lie of both.

 

Tim Hunt’s collections include Voice to Voice in the Dark(Broadstone Books) and Ticket Stubs & Liner Notes (winner of the 2018 Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award).  Originally from the hill country of northern California, he and his wife Susan live in Normal, Illinois, which is not hill country.  https://www.tahunt.com/poetry/