Listening Post, December 23rd, 1968 (poem)

Out here, gazing up at a trillion
flickering stars, I could be anyone.

I could be who I was ten months
ago, lying under a sycamore in

Monterey, Janice snuggled beside
me, just us, us and the stars, and

the moon. But no, I'm here, my head
pressed against a rice paddy dike,

my face blackened, my eyes staring
through a starlight scope. And the

universe is so much smaller. It barely
reaches beyond the rubber trees

around Trang Bang, or our perimeter
of claymore mines. Tracers shoot across

the dark sky like meteors or falling stars,
B-52 bombs pound the far horizon,

flares parachute down like tiny moons,
and I'm here, with Lonny, a thousand

klicks too far from the firebase to
make it back alive. I'm listening to

the distant rat-tat-tat of a firefight,
imagining the whispers of my starlight's

gray shadows low-crawling toward us
through the elephant grass. Any

moment and it could be over, my
hand pressing down on the plunger

to blow everything we have—booby
traps, claymores, flares—and then

running like hell through the jungle,
the bullets, the RPGs, the mortars

to reach Pershing, praying the guards
on the perimeter recognize it's us,

us coming in under fire, us running
hellbent for our Devil-may-care lives.

—rg cantalupo