“Could the Truth be so simple? So terrible?” Tim O’Brien asks,

finally, and the answer is a foregone conclusion, no secrets to hide.

Did he whisk her away to the lake of the woods or in it?

She was his world, he admits. So how could she vanish at his hands,

on his watch when no one was watching, secluded as they were?

She peeled back the veil, her first mistake, and the last of her seen.

 

It could have been the war, the memories, the love, the lost babies,

bayonet babies hanging on the clothes line in a weaver’s yard.

O’Brien’s tale, a mosaic of mown down wives and children in heat,

asks us to remember what he himself cannot forget, wants to dream

away in the river of Lethe, where souls drift loosed from lives lived.

The Sorcerer only giggled at the legions of corpses lining field streams.

Where is he now? Where is she then?  In the Lake of the Woods.