In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

THE ENCLOSURE Down the track of a Philippine Island We rode to the aircraft in trucks, Going past an enclosure of women, Those nurses from sick-tents, With a fume of sand-dust at our backs. We leapt to the tail-gate, And drew back, then, From the guards of the trembling compound, Where the nailed wire sang like a jew's-harp, And the women like prisoners paced. In the dog-panting night-fighter climbing, Held up between the engines like a child, I rested my head on my hands; The drained mask fell from my face. I thought I could see Through the dark and the heart-pulsing wire, Their dungarees float to the floor, And their light-worthy hair shake down In curls and remarkable shapes That the heads of men cannot grow, And women stand deep in a ring Of light, and whisper in panic unto us To deliver them out Of the circle of impotence, formed As moonlight spins round a propeller, Delicate, eternal, though roaring. A man was suspended above them, Outcrying the engines with lust. He was carried away without damage, And the women, inviolate, woke In a cloud of gauze, Overhearing the engines' matched thunder. Then, the voice of the man, inmixed, Seemed to them reassuring, unheard-of, 26 Passing out softly into the hush Of nipa-leaves, reeds and the sea, And the long wind up from the beaches, All making the nets to be trembling Purely around them, And fading the desperate sound To the whine of mosquitoes, turned back By the powdery cloth that they slept in, Not touching it, sleeping or waking, With a thing, not even their hair. The man sat away in the moonlight, In a braced, iron, kingly chair, As the engines labored And carried him off like a child To the west, and the thunderstruck mainland. It may have been the notion of a circle Of light, or the sigh of the never-thumbed wire, Or a cry with the shape of propellers, Or the untouched and breath-trembling nets, That led me later, at peace, To shuck off my clothes In a sickness of moonlight and patience, With a tongue that cried low, like a jew's-harp, And a white gaze shimmered upon me Like an earthless moon, as from women Sleeping kept from themselves, and beyond me, To sweat as I did, to the north : To pray to a skylight of paper, and fall' On the enemy's women With intact and incredible love. Into the Stone 2 7 ...

Share