Mark La Rue

Where You Are Is Where

Where you are is where the war is, rolling and falling,
and my letter will get to you late, with nothing to say
to what you've become.

What I would have said before
our words, all of our words collapse into milk,
what I would have tried to be is more than a rabbit
at its leaf, what I would have been, had I been,
I would have tried to there, looking for you on the fourth floor
of the library, and when I found you in Russian History
and you turned and walked into the snow-woods and a storm
carried me onto a train to the south, it must have been
a hundred boys in brown coats out shoveling
those rails to light, it must have been a white splash
on the kitchen floor when the mud this time of year
oozes right up to your cabin door and you wonder what to wear,
looking down and not seeing, looking up and knowing
war has unfrozen and down from the mountain.
The town and the trees are torn by my passing train: the ground
ripped downward, trees ripped upward, in the way we move.

When I saw a young man's pretty head lying
in the woods today I thought of everyone I knew
he wasn't, and set down last notes to each of you.

Where you are is rolling and falling, and my letter will
burn or spilled from a knapsack melt into
Stalingrad snow like panzer tracks on panzer tracks
on panzer tracks, escaping, faster than the landscape.

Where you are for me is where my words hold you,
so I would ask you please run faster than you read, leaving
before the letter ends, faster than the landscape,
faster than the planet rolling and falling like the stars.

I would say you are late: running the pace of trees and roads,
you remain in one place. The woods will gather speed.
Pray you fly as an animal chased to its low shelter:
a was, a blur, a tear-fuzzed letter. Be the image
the eyes of the steer see from the passing cattle cars.