JAMES NACHTWEY

Because there’s a war there
you go to the battlefield.

He met many living men
but they were nothing to him
compared to the dead he had known.

Sometimes, after taking pictures, he didn’t know which:
whether he should return to the land of the living
or the land of the dead,
which was which’s exit
and which was which’s entrance.

You don’t warble like a poet.
You don’t get grief-stricken like a novelist.
You rarely speak,
though there’s a reason for that.

Since there’s a grave,
someone must have lived here.
But even there where there’s no grave
someone might have lived.
There’s no land where there are no dead buried.
That’s what we have achieved in thousands of years.

Two cameras were your comrades.
You were mutually reticent
and no doubt will always be.

When night returns
you once again go forth.

Words are at a loss
and quietly watching you
from the top of the cliff.

JAMES NACHTWEY