Hazy eros residue of money hovers around this figure, and settles on my skin. I can’t wash myself of its thick condensation and my poems have lost that apotropaic power to deflect the soldier’s image, to keep it from usurping my own whenever I gaze in the mirror. The poems want to feel something buried improvised device to destroy this reflection, anything to activate whatever improvisation will have to have occurred here in order for tomorrow to be other than today, a future that fails to resemble the ongoing accumulation and privation that constitute the present. As part of an effort to ensure its claim on false futurity extension of dead time the present resurrects a fantasy of meaning identity that animates the soldier’s figure like a ghost money. No doubt, Melville senses this in “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Flight” when he identifies the modern soldier circa 1862 as mere “operative,” incarnation of the hoary warrior, who, in yet another manifestation today will become a prosthetic of finance, a tomb of meaning never there to begin with as it becomes one with nature.