1943

The alley out his window—
laundry on sagging lines
broken glass
a bicycle tire—
led to a narrow street
sometimes lit across from which
a courtyard more like
a dank box fed into
another alley that ran
straight into darkness

In the room he shared
with his brother 
far from the university
working with a slide rule
protractor and graph paper 
the Fourth Edition
of the Mechanical Engineers’ Handbook
by Lionel S. Marks
open before him
this was the slice of the world 
my father gazed at from his desk
and hoped to escape
a place even the pigeons avoided
while that same winter his brother 
drafted out of high school
rifle held chest-high
waded through rough surf
to a sunny beach in Sicily