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On the troop transport, which slips
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On the troop transport, which slips under the Golden Gate Bridge and heads out into the Pacific on a chill winter twilight two years later, he stands on deck and stares at San Francisco, fading away like dying logs in a fireplaceAfter a time he can see only the gaunt dark line of land still separating the water from the deepening nightThe waves splash coldly against the hullIn the old one he has looked and looked and butted his head against the wall of his own making
He ducks into a hatchway and lights a cigaretteThere is the phrase "I'm seeking for something" but it gives the process an importance it doesn't really possess, he thinksYou never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant
Somewhere in America now were the cities, and the refuse sitting on the steps, the electric lights and the obeisance to them
(All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the passion for movement like an ant nest suddenly jarredHow do you conceive your own death in all the marble vaults, the brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the market place?)
It was disappearing now, the water washing almost completely over the land, the long vast night of the Pacific settling overheadAnd there was the yearning toward the land that disappeared
Not love, not hate necessarily, but an emotion when he had expected none at all
Always there was the power that leaped at you, invited you
Hearn sighed, went out to the rail againAnd all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood
A bunch of dispossessedfrom the raucous stricken bosom of America
12
MINETTA was sent to the Division Clearing Hospital after he had been woundedEight squad tents, each with a capacity of twelve men, had been set up in a clearing near the shoreThe tents were aligned in two rows of four, and around each tent a four-foot wall of sandbags had been erectedThat was the extent of the hospital with the exception of a few extra tents at one end of the clearing which contained the field kitchen, the doctor's quarters, and the enlisted men working there
It was always quiet at the hospitalBy midafternoon the air was heavy and the inside of the tents had become unbearably hot from the intense sunMost of the patients drowsed uncomfortably murmuring in their sleep or groaning from their woundsThere was really very little to |