Infiltration Course

NOT in the Manuals of Instruction, telling
you how to mount and take the guns apart;
how to load and account for each minute deflection;
not in the precise and automatic drilling
(march and countermarch till eyeballs smart

with the sun and dust against them fiercely striking);
nor in the detonators of the mines,
delicately adjusted; nor the pierce
of bayonet ripping through brown sacking;
nor even in the arbitrary lines

drawn by barbed wire to mark the hostile holding,
are traced the truthful lineaments of war.
Maneuvers are charades, and at the most
you learn to filter through such hazards, folding
your body against danger, while before

you only clear objectives lie — revealing,
as you gain them, how to guard your head
and how to keep your belly close, and why
the things you do are done.
You have no feeling
that the soldiers labeled dead are really dead.

Within yourself you find the war. While learning
to crouch and dodge and thrust, you move alone
and lost to everything you knew before.
Having advanced beyond all backward turning,
impenetrably cut off, you now push on
with only hands, fear, and your life to call your own.