MOTIVATIONAL

There was an incident at the border of my memory. Whole areas were suddenly shut down, parking lots stretching out, rain-wet and empty. While the young guards looked on, nervous in chain-link shadow, certain conclaves held protests by torch-light. They were ignored, their words reduced by official radio to proper grunts of the forsaken and obnoxious.

Entire regions have been named off-limits. I couldn't reach them even if I had the proper papers. Several verdant fields are being torched under the cover of night; it is thought the ashen-lunged stubble left behind will be less aesthetically compromising. There will be relatives I miss on the other side, friends whose faces are even now becoming little more than phosphorous smudges, fingerprints wiped from a used bar glass, to be filed away only as evidence.

A list is being passed hurriedly around, written in a thick, blunt monotone of capitals. I am sure once it is cleared, I will be allowed to read it.

I count the minutes, which seem larger now that there are less of them. There is something to be said for this, this feeling. They are calling tonight a clean-sweep operation, a mopping-up, and it is true, I feel cleaner. I have shed countless fevers, doctor's visits, nauseous rendezvous, distended pronouncements of love, when all I felt inside was a vague terror.

It is true, I look in the mirror--there is less of me, and so I see myself better, every detail sharpened in the burnt air of absence. It is for my own sake this being done, I am told, as I wait with passport and raincoat, as rifles crack through the mist in the distance. For the sake of my body, something must go:

We are not speaking for ourselves,
we are speaking for the body.
We are speaking for ashes and glory,
and the hallowed things.
We are saying, your kingdom must be settled,
accounts wiped clean.
We are saying, thy will must be done,
thy will is everything.