After The Boston Marathon

  Whose war is this? Evening,an ordinary spring dayand my husband comes throughthe kitchen door,“Did you hear what happenedin Boston—at the Marathon?” he asks.For a moment, the sunshine,the birdsong, the forsythia in the vaseall stay the same,before dissolving into black. I call my sister.Her daughter and boyfriend,his family, yes, they are allaccounted for.  She was in hergarden, feeding the chickens, andjust found out herself.“They are shaken, she says,“in shock, but whole,”she reports.  Lucky,they were lucky, unlike Martin Richard, eight.A neighbor’s homeyDorchester  accentdescribes him“an ordinary little boy,freckles, y’know,an imp.”  She is crying now,can’t go on. Later,the boy’s father, his voiceunsteady, old, thanksall the people who helped them—those who prayed for them,those known and unknown.His wife and daughterwill survive, he says.Is survivingour new art form? Lucky, they were lucky.Unlike Krystal Campbell,Whose mother can barelyspeak through her tears“Krystle Marie, she wasa wonderful person;she had a heart of gold;this doesn’t make sense,”The pain in her voice istoo raw,  I squirm, barelybreaking before I hitthe car in front of me,the one with the vanityplates, “GAGURL.” The victims talk of angerthat cannot find a target,no faces to picture, nohuman enemy, no sense.Who? Who? Thenewly legless want to know.I can barely read thedescriptions of amputations,of shredded flesh, of limbsripped off, of nails embedded inflesh, and I feel my own fleshexposed, vulnerable. I don’twant to feel this or watch the mayhem, overand over, and yet I do, Iwatch the runners fall,the blood spill, the manclawing the air,the smoke ascendinglike a burnt offering.  I wantto disregard the now eerilyfamiliar images, just as I triedto disregard the imagesover there, to not let them in.Over there is here now.We are in it now,in someone’s,persons unknown’s,senseless war.