As I descended into the excavation and a polished wall deepening on one side of the walkway reflected more and more of the grass sloping upward on the other, the din of Constitution Avenue decreased, but the stillness surrendered to other sounds I could just make out: gunfire, men frantically shouting instructions, a helicopter's rotor blades. Continuing down, I clearly heard a whistle like that of a rocket and then the roar of low-flying jet planes, all coming impossibly from the panels of black granite, as if they were a radio. The deeper my descent, the greater the volume and variety of the unexpected soundtrack—the pop of grenades, the rapid nasals of the Vietnamese language, a spade clanging against rocky soil, a whispered "Our Father," raspy and irregular breathing, rain—until the explanation as flare lit up the inside of my head: I was hearing what the men named on the wall heard at the precise moment each died. At the vertex, where the wall loomed high above me, a visual crescendo matching the aural one, and the two wings of the wall sank to ten feet and met each other, the sounds became unbearable. I put my hands to my ears. A young couple standing near me did not seem to hear what I heard and looked at me as if my behavior were a threat to them. Abruptly all sounds ceased. Shrouded in absolute silence, I knew I had died, my ears now useless, two pieces of senseless meat. But an angel, a child with a red, white, and blue pinwheel racketing in the capital wind, raised me from the dead. I hurried up the walkway, catching more and more of the stir of Constitution again, car engines, honking, the wheeze of a bus. When my head passed higher than the top of the wall, the old sounds returned fully and I saw joggers between me and the avenue. But now their shoes against the pavement sounded like drumming, as if the earth were a great resonating chamber. I could even hear the runners' individual drops of sweat striking the cement. They crashed, salty waves on stone pilings, where they had fallen from those lithe, tanned, determined bodies that cut through their own self-satisfaction like swimmers through viscous water.

Philip Dacey's sixth and seventh books appeared in 1999: The Deathbed Playboy (East. Wash. U. Press) and The Paramour of the Moving Air (Quarterly Review of Literature). The Book of Eakins: Poems, a book-length sequence of poems about the painter, has recently been completed. A chapbook, What's Empty Weighs the Most: 24 Sonnets (Black Dirt Press), appeared in 1997. He teaches part-time at the Minnesota state university in Marshall.

 Philip

 Dacey