--USAFA, 1970
I
Poised half the way up the Rockies' east front range,
we three toiled in a crowd of blue
suits, unmilitant militants in a melange
of would-be scholarly soldiers: we trained our shoes
to be mirrors of our stoical face,
schooled our minds in how to bulletproof
our young bodies, measured our swift days in pacing
punishments on a latticed terrazo,
and gave infinite care to out jackboot lacings.
Early to bed, early we rose to this martial piazza
and marched, asleep, to a pre-dawn breakfast,
though praying first to a young warrior's gods;
and then off to class where benignant achitects
of inhuman designs taught us the methods
of human erasure, pure, chaste, and delectable.
Late afternoons, our football became a bullet
of innocent intent, a guided missile
for the fraternal strife of playing cadets.
Remote, in that high air, what could we tell
to those mountains about a distant shrapnel?
What could we know of the blooded ineffable?
II
Three young, unthinking reeds--
fragile Swan, sinuous swimmer
in discontent; dumb Wise
who'd mindless aspire without intent;
and Tony Zap, pure mafioso
of his burnt-out, desirous bent--
frozen in the green of their spring year
find vision suddenly sprung upward,
up the ooming, overarching
Rampart Range and find as sudden
hearts beating up that steep
slope, the vertiginous slope climbing
eastward and up towards the pale sun,
and vine-like up they begin to creep.
III
And so pointed our plod up that sliding slide of peak,
placed each foot, feeling grave fetters receding,
noted tough pines thinning, our streterous talk
blown up the balding slope, buoyant in rarified blue
of heaving ascent, and hefted to communal hearts
onto granite crag, at last, and beheld the midget grace
of a world grown small below.
IV
stone face mountain high--
we blow the reefer-mad spring
out over endless plains
V
And then down
screeing. skiing down the slope
from rock to branch
to rock and rock
and rock, hairless
heads streaming back
and up, pulsating
brains
grinning
at speed
and dopplering trees
only to come to rest
at the still
point
where a contoured green
spawns the rectangular stone terrazo.
VI
Down, down, we came from the crown of the granite tor,
remembering only the distancing green arc of plain
fading at dark--that Monday, we played at that war
once more, stepping through that and each following day
in their dutiful succession; below, mendicant whores
sold everyday wares and politicos weighed and delayed.
Each morning, the blue geometer of our faceless crowd
spoke as one, and resounded over the muffling clouds.
VII
Sundays, sirens wailed
somewhere else--under the sun-drench
of stained glass, we sat
quiet and cool, cowering
in the holy guise
of a religious innocence.
