The Soldier

To stand in the doorway is to stand in more brief worlds than this one, and within the intermundium, where the small rain falls as part of the kingdom of silence. It falls on the houses and on the houses. Looking out from the doorway it is so much more than a landscape where the weather enters into your heart like a word: ideas belong to the world and your local body, the elective place. But at the same time, like the mansuctude and inweaving of sentences and their tiderace of meanings. There is only ever the world. But what happened there? Then? The rain was also blanketing the darkening land of history as it swept all the miles to your door. It was falling for millennia with its own mind and then across gardens, reflecting pools, draggled hedges and into deserted grey squares and lengthening colonnades; like a population. And now into the field of Europe where it descends on the man fallen briefly under curtain-fire; his body going back to earth, mouldering into the blood-wet marl, under the small rain. I know it’s raining but once we will walk out through the doorway of events into a wider prospect of ideas; but again weighed down with the blandishment of the years and their nets of change, stumbling, the rain in our faces, into the sound of firing.