I’ve locked the doors tonight, checking the bolts twice just to make sure.
Turned off all the lights. Only the fan blades rotate above, as slow as helicopters
winding down in their oily gears.

I can hear the water buffalo outside.
They’ve been there for hours, chewing on the front grass, snorting.
When the sprinklers switch on, white cowbirds lift up off their shoulders
with heavy wingbeats, a column of feathers rising over my home,
wing tips backlit by the moon.

I peer through venetian blinds to see
the Iraqi prisoners in that dank cell at Firebase Eagle, staring back at me.
They say nothing, just as they did in the winter of 2004, wordless
in the piss-cold dark, on scraps of cardboard, staring.

Snipers traverse the skyline
from the neighbor’s rooftops. There are helicopters on station, fifteen minutes out.
And out in the dark, it’s difficult to tell the living from the dead. They walk
through elephant grass, through thickets of papyrus, lining the asphalt streets.
I see Bosch, my old rifleman, sleepwalking among them. He is on fire
and doesn’t realize it.