Kalden's Story

So won a name in this place,   

handing off lath strips to a hammer's   

measure, seeing the passing girls' slits   

in roils of timber grain.

Mountains, barley, scaffold,   

dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly   

from the hoods of faraway bells   

monks emerging like hairless animals.

I was sixteen. What did I know   

of sovereignty, or the new soldiers   

by the gate, chinning their shotguns   

like violins? Nights, a tin roof

wind cracked flat; my sister,   

flushed with child, hushing a child.