If your Personal Number starts with 767
you were drafted in July 2004,
in the heat of a teenage summer,
and you didn’t know what to wear to a drafting.
You didn’t know what to do with your arms;
dangling like loose strings off a cotton shirt. You figure
the cotton will soak up the sweat, but you don’t know
anything about deserts. You don’t know the way a lizard
hunches over a rock, how African ants descent on a corpse
in formation, how the M16 will bruise the bow of your shoulder.
And you will move so many rocks from one tent
to another, for no particular reason if not to teach you
that you do not matter at all.
You are not even a pawn. Not even the beginning
of a number. And the CO doesn’t want
to be here; she doesn’t like the swearing.
She is going to be a biologist;
she prefers to focus on small cell
carcinomas. But she understands the way
a unit organizes. She understands an order.
And you will come to understand
that many things she tells you,
will be a kind of truth, though
not a Ciceronian truth or an Augustinian truth.
An Old Testament truth: truth as a very long
road, which leads to many paths, and the road
has gravel on it and offers little shade, little
places to take cover if you hear a shot.
I’ll tell you right now, if your number starts with 767
you must find your own olive tree. Your own truth,
your own kind of country from which to let an ancient
prayer escape your lips and nothing more.
