Poem on the pictures coming in from Abu Ghraib

after the death (a good man,
a hat every day, office worker, father)
after the death, after the war,
a long time after
his widow finds

beneath the sheaves of snapshots,
beneath his box of ribbons and
the Japanese short sword
brought home from Iwo and rusted
with god-knows, at the bottom
of all that, a box of ears

human but no longer human,
withered
like winter apples,
smell of a long sweetening

a long time after, she asks me
what to do with them, what
to do with any of this,
what any of us
might do