The
Mission
by Gail Mazur
Soot everywhere. Trains, as if World War Two were our
era,
pulling out of old South Station. At every grimy window,
two or three men—their postures grief-struck, heroic.
The iron terminal all my grandparents had arrived at,
their valises and sacks abulge with whatever mean
practical possessions they’d thought to lug into
their futures.
Now I had their copper pans, their Sabbath candlesticks.
Gloom saturated the enormous room—no light motes,
no cappuccinos, no New York Times bestsellers.
No matter
what the mission, you’d be too proud to fail to
carry through....
The hanging clock’s hands could hardly bear the
inching heavy weight
of time; I couldn’t see the arrows move, but if
even one local clock
were taken for repair or replacement, we’d be saved
from separation.
Were we—was I—certain you had no rational
choice but to report
for duty? You shouldered an Italian leather case I’d
never seen,
I, who’d polished and folded all your belongings.
I touched your face,
you, already distant, aching to “get on with it,”
and I—I knew
a great hole was being torn in my life, my life that felt
like
the kind of rice paper Japanese printmakers always seemed
to use—
such colors, such defined images of comfort and beauty
ripped away.
Who’d ordered you to go, to cross three continents
and three oceans, knowing the inescapable dangers? Was
it
the Secretary of War, that garrulous fool? What could
I have thought
to do or say to keep you from the mysterious assignment
you welcomed,
impelled as you seemed to be by your headstrong restlessness,
your admirable infuriating insistence on doing what’s
too hard?
Was it too late? On Track Ten, obstinate, oblivious of
your wife
pleading in the metallic din, were you off to rescue,
or murder,
a harmless sinner, were you already doomed to end in a
dark alley,
iron and soot, by good angels untenanted? Don’t
go don’t go don’t go
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