Willard Airport

And also finger smudges
on the museum’s white walls.

Branches rise an unlit wick in snow.

The book says you can distill
the first World War into a collection

of railroad timetables—
the logistics of war the logistics

of waiting bodies pushed through
moonlit fields, which is to say

I have arrived here on time

timed-through, which is to say pushed
through scratching like candlelight

in a train car grammatically dark (here,
here) which in this poem can be the woman’s

orange-painted fingernail perusing mystery

novels in the airport convenience store,
if you’d like. Airports for lights, shadows

and particles, he called the white canvases,
finger to his chin, scratching, squinting,

his hat casting a hat-shaped shadow on the canvas,
kind or unkind people getting in cars or trains

or planes to arrive here, to happen upon this man’s
hat-shaped shadow on a white rectangle

or how the rests in a musical score make
a bored listener’s beard scratching

symphonic, grass-shivered, a field.
Once troops mobilized, it would have been

a logistical nightmare to change course,
which is to say when landing

the country seemed fingerpainted,

framed and hung in the corner
of the airport terminal, above a plaque that reads

‘First Prize in Bottenfield Elementary’s Art Contest,
Jack, 7 years old, Sno Stuck on the Trees’