A Tapestry for Bayeux

I   Recto Over the seaworthy cavalry arches a rocketry wickerwork: involute laceries lacerate indigo altitudes, making a skywritten filigree into which, lazily, LCTs sinuate, adjutants next to them eversharp- eyed, among delicate battleship umbrages twinkling an anger as measured as organdy. Normandy knitted the eyelets and yarn of these warriors’ armoring— ringbolt and dungaree, cable and axletree, tanktrack and ammobelt linking and opening garlands and islands of seafoam and sergeantry. Opulent fretwork: on turquoise and emerald, red instants accenting neatly a dearth of red. Gunstations issue it; vaportrails ease into smoke from it— yellow and ochre and umber and sable and out. Or that man at the edge of the tapestry holding his inches of niggardly ground and his trumpery order of red and his equipage angled and dated. He. II   Verso Wasting no energy, Time, the old registrar, evenly adds to his scrolls, rolling up in them rampage and echo and hush—in each influx of surf, in each tumble of raincloud at evening, action of seaswell and undertow rounding an introvert edge to the surge until, manhandled over, all surfaces, tapestries, entities veer from the eye like those rings of lost yesteryears pooled in the oak of your memory. Item: one Normandy Exercise. Muscle it over, an underside rises: a raggedy elegant mess of an abstract: a rip-out of kidstuff and switchboards, where amputee radio elements, unattached nervefibre conduits, openmouthed ureters, tag ends of hamstring and outrigging ripped from their unions and nexuses jumble with undeterred speakingtubes twittering orders as random and angry as ddt’d hornets. Step over a moment: peer in through this nutshell of eyeball and man your gun.