THE HILL THEY CALL THE HORSE

A POEM

by

JAMES JONES

I am in a hospital, and it is the middle of the night.

I cannot sleep.

My body lies relaxed, inert upon a mattress,
Soft yielding mattress, bandaged up with clean starched sheets.

A pillow, smooth and cool, in which my head is buried.

I lie in comfort--but it is very strange.

My body is not used to comfort. It has forgotten.

I must reteach it.

This must by the reason for my wretched wakefulness?

Perhaps. It may be so.

I lie thus--and keep on lying.

That which is me stands apart--a me that is not me--

And feels my teeth grate in their grinding

And feels my ears reach out--

With every nerve and fiber in them--

Listening--listening--straining for the Sound.

My brain is slavering and drooling spittle

Like a great hound straining at its leash

2

Eager to be off into the thick and slimy darkness.

The leash of frantic will is slender.

It snaps. I do not care.

The hound is off, baying to its echoes.

My brain has broken loose and left me.

It rushes forward eagerly into Time To Come.

I am standing, lonely in the writhing blood of dawn,
Atop a hill--I know this hill.

I have stood before--because far off the sea,
Like a basin underneath a leaking pipe,
Like a vampire underneath a leaking throat,
Yawns wide its maw to catch the drippings of the dawn.

I have stood before--because all about me,
Over earth, on trees, into thirsty dust,
(I can feel it on my hands; it's sticky on my face.)
Dawn's jugular pours.

And yet I am a stranger here; I do not know this place.
I am of the tortured past(the so-conveniently forgotten past),
And in this present of the future the past is out of place.
This future present is of death, of silence,
And of the deathlike memory of life
That is no longer life but deathless death.

For, you see, I am standing on The Horse, brought back
By some mad joke of laughing demons,
Brought back in fear and loathing and against my will.

(I can already feel it, that remembered blade of terror,
Stark and black, sawing dully at my belly.)

Because memory will not let me lose it,
I am standing on the blasting, cursing, gasping Horse of Then

3

That is the dead, decayed, and sleepless Horse of Now.

Everything is quiet now.

The awesome still I do not know is heavy and opaque.

It drips from the trees and rolls slowly, like thick syrup,
Into crumbling foxholes.

It is the stillness of forgotten hate and of reluctant memory.

Yes, everything is quiet now, but the evidence is here:
Crumbling holes half-filled with stagnant rain;

A twisted bit of steel that might have been a helmet;

A bayonet crusted deep with tropic rust still sticking upright in the
earth;

Half-buried rifle barrel, stock long since rotted into nothingness;
One place the gleaming baldness of a skull

With splintered teeth.

Its empty sockets stare at me reproachfully:
I have disturbed its sleep.

And my fear crawls up and chokes me.

This is why I came!

This is the force of madness that took me by the hand

And would not let me cringe! Why me! Why me!

Dumbly with cloven tongue I stand in the bloody dawn
Atop The Horse.

I would run: My legs laugh in my face.

For across the crest they come

In solitary line

As I last saw them:

Dried mud ground into their green fatigues, gritty to the touch;

Helmets, those who have them, rusty, caked with mud;

Sweat streaming down faces twisted with the agony of fear and tension.

4

They pass by me with stumbling tread,
And each looks at me reproachfully and sadly:

They died; I lived. They resent my luck.

They cannot see that I am not the lucky one.

As they pass I see them as I saw them last:
George Creel--

Joe Donnicci--

His eyes big behind his glasses and a gaping hole where once had been
his ear;

Young Shelley--

Balls shot away and holding in his guts that pooch out between his fingers

Hannon--

Stumbling along, face gone below the eyes;

Big Kraus--

No marks, no blood, just dead with hard-set lips and unbelieving eyes;

Set Lecchessi--

Belly ripped wide open, still gasping: "Help me. Help me. Can'tcha see?
I'm gonna die!"

The line goes on--for there are many.

Red Johanssen--

Both legs gone and spouting fountains while he drags himself across the
ground.

The line goes on--for there are many more.

There is the boy (I never knew his name)

Who was lying wounded on a litter,

Glad he had been wounded,
And believing he was safe at last

When a sniper blew his brains out

And filled the litter with a pool of blood.

The line goes on--

I see it in the distance, climbing,

5

Groping blindly up that hill,

That hill they call The Horse.

Then my unseen chains release me,

And I am away--through swirling wisps of madness and of pain.

I am back inside my body with its straining antenna of fear.

I am safe--at least for now,

But I cannot relax:

I know I must go back some day--provided that I live.

I must see this place in stillness--when the jungle has reclaimed it.

Or I shall never rest.

I cannot sleep tonight.....Perhaps a pill.