The major, old in grade, stood by his bunk
and spooned up peaches from a can.
His eyes were red from drink and reading forms.
They widened at a sound beyond his open door:
shh shh shh, shh shh shh.

He’d thought that he was by himself
in this old hall with its pagoda eaves
and its foundation fitted of hewn stone.

The base was once an aviation school.
Now ROTC grads slept in a dorm
built for the empire’s flight cadets.
Enlisted men lived in a ringing space
beneath a seaplane hangar’s iron arch.
But in this office block, ad center for the post,
sole billet was the bedroom where he stood,
awake again, as on so many nights,
within the empty quiet of the place.

Earlier he’d shown the guard a pass
that he had written for himself,
and sat down in a tin-walled bar
four blocks beyond the compound gate.
The beer was cheaper than the o-club had;
the grinning skinny counter girl
had run a finger up the long tap grip
and asked him: You, same same?

But he had come to drink, not thinking of a woman.
And when he shambled from the bar, he was alone.

Then, back at the administration center,
he’d felt, in just an instant’s dizzy notice,
the distant upturned gable ends
sway in the air like wings above his head.

Now in the darkened hall outside his room,
a figure dressed in clogs and a white robe
hushed up into the doorway – shh shh,
shh shh shh - behind a G.I. push broom,
to turn a face round as a child’s toward him,
then move beyond behind the brush’s whisper.

A question drove the major to the door.
He watched the cleaner’s halting progress
down the shadowed hall and round the corner,

and heard her broom for just a little longer
as he turned back toward his bed. He halted,
staring out a window at the yellow passages
cast underneath the barracks’ pie-pan shades
toward the drill ground where no light fell.

Jack Romig is the poetry editor of CommonSense 2. He lives with his wife and sons in Huff’s Church, Pa.