Produced by Dennis Camire

This week’s poem is by Bruce Guernsey of Bethel. His most recent book is “From Rain: Selected Poems,” from Ecco Qua Press, 2012.

THE WALL

By Bruce Guernsey

Someone has opened a giant

map and with the tips of our

fingers, each of us suddenly

blind,

we track the black cold of this

monument for names we know

like finding a route home.

Lost here

this damp spring morning,

the cherries exploding like the Fourth of

July, we wonder how many maps of Viet

Nam sold those years,

so many strange sounding places.

One of us holds a magnifying

glass to McCarroll, McMorris,

McNabb, small print in the

polished stone,

the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga,

Illinois, might have done, late at night

searching that faraway land on his kitchen table,

hearing again the morning

paper thump against the front

door, that boy on his bike in

the dark

grown and gone — what was his

name, that kid from down the

block? —

Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi.

Dennis Camire can be reached at dcamire@cmcc.edu