Into the Sun
Clark’s fingers slip along the smooth page. The letters are hard to make out in
the dim light, hard to make his brain grasp meaning right now, but he wants to.
Understand.
All he can do is grasp small untethered words, jumping up from the print like
gnats – ‘air’ … ‘hell’ … ‘brothers’ … ‘boy’ … ‘sun’ …
Sun. Clark remembers the sun, misses the sun. It’s only ten o’clock, the sun
only went down a couple of hours ago, but suddenly Clark can’t remember the last
time he felt sunlight on his face.
There’s a penciled note in the margin, and Luthor’s slanted hand makes itself
decipherable beside the round too-black shapes of the print.
Clark.
His name. Luthor only once called him that, once in three long years, but here,
in this secret dust-smelling volume, Clark is named again.
Clark.
No hint of how Luthor felt, what the name meant to him, just from the
penmanship, the stroke of pencil. Only a word, like Luthor was trying it out,
idly scrawling against the paper to enjoy the drag of lead on the heavy page.
Clark’s eyes shift left, and he reads.
Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Clark’s throat closes like a vise, and he can’t read further. He closes the book
and sits back against the wall, sick.
Move him into the sun –
Lex.
***
So it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Even Lex knew it, knew that he should
have been the one left alone. One of them is strong enough to bear this burden,
only one, and it isn’t Clark. There’s been some mistake.
Clark is dressed and ready for the inspection parade. It has been a week.
It has been an instant.
He never expected to pick up the book again, but he does, and his fellow
paratroopers funnel out of the room, wordlessly leaving him with the volume in
hand.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Clark wants to laugh, so he does. Did Lex believe this? Did he believe in a kind
old sun and a poet who could write such flowery words about something as ugly
and simple as death?
Lex would. Lex always believed stupid things, grand things. Clark can picture
him now, crouched over Clark’s own dead body, murmuring these words with an epic
gleam in his eyes. Lex would have, because that’s the way it should have been.
Clark, finished, stopped, and Lex, going on bravely, poetically.
Not this.
Move him into the sun –
Cover him with earth.
Clark closes the book and slips it between his mattress and the bedframe.
***
It has been a month.
It has been a lifetime.
Think of how it wakes the seeds –
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
But there is nothing miraculous about a seed. Seeds can rot and they can mould
and once they do, there’s no sunlight that can wake them. It’s simple farmer’s
sense, this knowledge, but Lex wouldn’t see it that way. He would look at
Clark’s broken body and wonder if, planting it, he would see Clark rise again.
Lex would, like this poet, like other ludicrous obsolete war poets, look at
poppies and think of Clark’s veins feeding them their color, Clark's eternal
rest lending them their opiate powers. Lex would smile wistfully, painfully, and
he would square his shoulders and move on.
Gently its touch awoke him once
Clark can’t see that. He can’t see beauty where there is only – earth. Mud.
Compost. Rot.
When Clark looks in the mirror to shave, he sees a moldering seed, untouched by
the sun. Unwoken.
He is the sun-kissed dead.
***
The colonel pins Clark, grins and apologizes because anyone else would have been
stabbed, if only a little, by the hasty jab of that pin. Clark feigns a wince,
tries to understand that he is an officer now. This is what Lex wanted for him.
He will return home an officer.
It has been six months.
It hasn’t ever stopped.
Clark can’t close his eyes without seeing it, seeing Lex dead. With every blink,
every flicker of his eyelids, Lex is there. And superimposed on his white skin,
the penciled word, ‘Clark’, because that bullet was meant for Clark, that bullet
that stopped halfway through Lex’s skull. That same bullet has never stopped
drilling its way through Clark’s brain.
Lieutenant Kent.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
“Dear Mom and Dad – you will be proud, I reckon.”
Move him into the sun –
Discharge papers, weighty after the confetti of victory.
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
In a shipbound dreamscape, Lex stands next to Clark and they both look over the
Atlantic. They are smoking indolently under a cloudy sky. Lex cracks a grin and
says, “You've really got to learn what's meant by the phrase 'swearing like a
trooper',” and he squints up at Clark and laughs.
-- O what made the fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?
A long train-ride, smile after smile from thin nervous women, knowing smirks
from other soldiers. They try to talk, these green- and navy-clad men, compare
stories, but mostly they end up in silence, watching their country glide by,
seeing how it’s no more real than a film, than a book, than a poem.
Move him into the sun –
Clark steps off the train and feels the light hit him, beating at his skin,
seeking entrance, purchase, permeability.
Lex couldn’t have known, Clark thinks, but the poem actually fits.
Its title is ‘Futility’.
***
The poem is by Wilfred Owen, who was one of the great war poets in the First
World War. He was also a closeted homosexual.
Futility
Move him into the sun-
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Think how it wakes the seeds-
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?