We went to Bull Run, or was it Manassas, one of those, past Battlefield Ford, past Glory Days bar in the strip mall, or was it before the mall was built, or

was it after the mall was abandoned. I was grizzled with age, I was twenty one, at the small beige visitor center. I remember it without

sound. They had a machine there that sucked up sound. It was mostly made of hollows, blanks, lack, and also plastic. It came with a smaller version

of itself, whose job was to suck the sound of the larger sound- sucker. It did its work. It was about the size of a foot. Either run that,

or the place would be filled with ordinary sounds, squirrels twitching their tails, chattering, one to another in their ceaseless brag about acorn-hordes. They couldn’t risk

the sound of dirt, suffocated under the sewn sod, or the possibility of rustling leaves. This is not the grass where it happened, not the starved pines. These clouds have

shifted. Never do they look like hacked arms, heaped corpses. We lay in the sound- empty field under the cloud constellation of Virginia. Look up: that one’s a crutch,

that one’s a stump, that one’s a burning town, and the yellow tendrils of gangrene. The air turned to ether. The ether was painless, it was all painless, I swear.