Randall Jarrell Collection

In the turret's great glass dome, the apparition, death,
Framed in the glass of the gunsight, a fighter's blinking wing,
Flares softly, a vacant fire. If the flak's inked blurs-
Distributed, statistical-the bombs' lost patterning
Are death, they are death under glass, a chance
For someone yesterday, someone tomorrow; and the fire
That streams from the fighter which is there, not there,
Does not warm you, has not burned them, though they die.
Under the leather and fur and wire, in the gunner's skull,
It is a dream: and he, the watcher, guiltily
Watches the him, the actor, who is innocent.
It happens as it does because it does.
It is unnecessary to understand; if you are still
In this year of our warfare, indispensable
In general, and in particular dispensable
As a cartridge, a life-it is only to enter
So many knots in a window, so many feet;
To switch on for an instant the steel that understands.
Do as they said; as they said, there is always a reason-
Though neither for you nor for the fatal
Knower of wind, speed, pressure: the unvalued facts.
(In Nature there is neither right nor left nor wrong.)


So the bombs fell: through clouds to the island,
The dragon of maps: and the island's fighters
Rose from its ruins, through blind smoke, to the flights-
And fluttered smashed from the machinery of death.
Yet inside the infallible invulnerable
Machines, the skin of stell, glass, cartridges,
Duties, responsibilities, and-surely-deaths,
There was only you; the ignorant life
That grew its weariness and loneliness and wishes
Into your whole wish: "Let it be the way it was.
Let me not matter, let nothing I do matter
To anybody, anybody. Let me be what I was."


And you are home, for good now, almost as you wished;
If you matter, it is as little, almost, as you wished.
If it has changed, still, you have had your wish
And are lucky, as you figured luck-are, truly, lucky.
If it is different, if you are different,
It is not from the lives or the cities;
The world's war, just or unjust-the world's peace, war or peace
But from a separate war: the shell with your name
In the bursting turret, the crystals of your blood
On the splints' wrapped steel, the hours wearing
The quiet body back to its base, its missions done;
And the slow flesh failing, the terrible flesh
Sloughed off at last-and waking, your leg gone,
To the dream, the old, old dream: it happens,
It happens as it does, it does. it does-


But not because of you, write the knives of the surgeon,
The gauze of the theatre, the bearded and aging face
In the magic glass; if you wake and understand,
There is always the nurse, the leg, the drug-
If you understand, there is sleep, there is sleep...
Reading of victories and sales and nations
Under the changed maps, in the sunlit papers;
Stumbling to the toilet on one clever leg
Of leather, wire, and willow; staring
Past the lawn and the trees to nothing, to the eyes
You looked away from as they looked away: the world outside
You are released to, rehabilitated
-What will you do now? I don't know-
It is these. If, standing irresolute
By the whitewashed courthouse, in the leafy street,
You look at the people who look back at you, at home,
And it is different-you have understood
Your world at last: you have tasted your own blood.