What the Wood Remembers

Five bodies in a square metre of wood
learned how the living take each other’s breath.
The wood remembers what the walls deny:
the tower and the voltage and the blows,
the little cages fastened in the dark
where one by one they waited without time.
No window brought them morning.
Only birds with their own affairs.
Perhaps the worst was not the pain itself
but that long neighbourhood of coming death:
the footstep stopping somewhere on the stair,
the name called out, the engine in the yard.
To know the body soon would leave no grave,
no earth where grief could place its faithful stone.

Helicopters travelled towards the sea.
Below them, Chile narrowed to a shore;
beyond, the cold Pacific opened wide,

Ignacio was planting a tree, hands in mud.
He had been fifteen when the terror started.
Communist, he stood there in his boots,
beside the mural raised by his own hands
for comrades dead, for comrades disappeared –
the faces colour had returned to sight.
His name recalled the saint fed to the lions,
though history never needs the ancient beasts:
a uniform, a wire, a careful file
will serve the appetite of any age.

Yet there he stood, his boots firm in the soil,
pressing the young tree’s roots into the earth.
He said the place was beautiful as well –
as well: not healed, not innocent, not whole.
The dead require no ugliness from us.
The disappeared are not restored by weeds.

Now every plank bears witness in its grain.
The tower’s wood, the cabins, and the cages,
the tree that Ignacio settles in the ground:
one substance entered differently by time,
one made to hold men in, one made to grow,
one keeping what the executioner forgot.
For nothing is destroyed completely here.
The sea gives back no bodies, but their names
return in paint, in footsteps, roots, and rain.

The garden darkens. Ignacio’s boots
leave two deep memories in the watered earth.
The wood remembers.

——————————

The line

Bells, saucepans, the hum
of a helicopter hovering
above our heads, patrolling
the streets, watching the explosion.