Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (2 page)

Meditation on a Main Supply Route

I recall Route Tampa going on

in a straight line all the way

out of the war.

A hundred MSRs

with names once so unpronounceable

they are now called Chevy and Toyota;

their attendant smells

and voices arrive

in such disparate places

as Danville, Virginia;

Monterey, California;

Steubenville, Ohio;

Weslaco, Texas;

Fayettevilles

of both North Carolina

and of Arkansas;

the Bronx, New York,

where Curtis Jefferson's

cauterized face still burns

as he wraps his lips

around a straw to drink his juice

and his muscles wither and he wishes

he had died instead of living

houseboundbedboundmindboundbodybound

like a child, watching

as his mother watched

the roads, pitted and seeded,

arrive as one road in front of his house,

get out of a black sedan

with
GOVERNMENT USE
license plates

and become two men

walking up the front steps

of the converted brownstone,

where they wait. And the roads

reach out to Steven Abernathy

in the factory where he works,

after, on C shift, forever, and Steven

saying to the old intractable drunks he works with

that all pain is phantom and that's all

as he cleats the red knuckle of his leg

into the stirrup above the plastic rest of it,

before they take him to the VFW post

for a PBR on them at least twice a week,

now almost daily for a month,

arriving in the glare of six a.m. light

off the quarter panels of their rusted trucks.

Sometimes by noon the old men say Vietnam

and he says, I lost my leg

on the goddamn MSR and old Earl Yates says,

Naw, they took it, the fuckers.

  

I am home and whole, so to speak.

The streetlights are in place along the avenue

just as I remembered

and just as I remember

there is tar slick on the poles

because it has rained. It doesn't matter.

I know these roads will work

their way to me. They may arrive

right here, at this small circle of light

folding in on itself where brick

and broken sidewalk meet.

So, I must be prepared. But I can't remember

how to be alive. It has begun

to rain so hard I fear I'll drown.

I guess we ought to

take these pennies off our eyes,

strike into them new likenesses;

toss them with new wishes

into whatever water can be found.

Two

Improvised Explosive Device

The blast from an improvised explosive device moves at 13,000 mph, gets as hot as 7,000 degrees and creates 400 tons of pressure per square inch. “No one survives that. We're trying to save the kids at 25 meters and beyond.”

—Ronald Glasser in the
Army Times

If this poem had wires

coming out of it,

you would not read it.

If the words in this poem were made

of metal, if you could see

the mechanics of their curvature,

you would hope

they would stay covered

by whatever paper rested

in the trash pile they were hidden in.

But words or wires would lead you still

to fields of grass between white buildings.

 

If this poem were made of metal and you read it, if you did

decide to read or hear the words, you would see wires

where there were none,

you would pick up the slack of words, you would reel

them in, pull

loose lines

until you stood in that dry field,

where you'd sweat. You would wonder how you looked

from rooftop level, if you had been targeted.

If these words were buried beneath debris, you would

ask specific questions, like, am I in a field of words?

What will happen if they are unearthed?

Is the entire goddamn country full of them?

Prefer that they be words, not wires, not made of metal,

which is almost always trouble. If these words should lead you

to the rough center of a field,

you'll stand half-blind

from the bright light off white buildings,

still holding the slack line in your hand,

wondering if you have been chosen.

You'll realize that you both have been and not,

and that an accident is as much of a choice

as saying, “I am going to read this poem.”

  

If this poem had wires coming out of it,

you would call the words devices,

if you found them threatening in any way,

for ease of communication

and because you would marvel

at this new, broad category.

This is another way of saying

we'd rely on jargon to understand each other,

like calling a year a tour,

even though there are never any women

in bustled dresses carrying umbrellas

to protect complexions. In moments

you might think these words were grand,

in an odd way, never imagining you would

find a need to come back to them,

or that you'd find days

that you were desperate

for the potential of metal,

wires, and hidden things.

  

And if this poem was somehow traveling

with you

in the turret of a Humvee,

you would not see the words

buried at the edges of the road.

You would not see the wires. You would not

see the metal. You would not see the danger

in the architecture

of a highway overpass.

 

If this poem has left you deaf,

if the words in it are smoking,

if parts of it have passed through your body

or the bodies of those you love, this will go a long way

toward explaining why you will, in later years,

prefer to sleep on couches. If these words have caused

casualties, then this poem will understand

that, oftentimes, to be in bed

is to be one too many layers

away from wakefulness.

  

If this poem was made of words

the sergeant said—after, like, don't

worry boys, it's war, it happens—

as the cab filled up with opaque smoke

and laughter, then it would be natural

for you to think of rote—
rauta,

the old Norse called it, the old

drumbeat of break of wave

on shore—as an analogue

for the silence that has filled your ears

again

and particles of light

funneled through the holes

made by metal meeting metal

meeting muscle meeting bone.

 

You would not see. You would not hear. You would not

be blamed for losing focus for a second: this poem

does not come with an instruction manual. These words

do not tell you how to handle them.

You would not be blamed

for what they'd do if they were metal,

or for after taking aim at a man holding a telephone in his hand

in an alley. You would not be blamed for thinking

words could have commanded it.

  

If this poem had fragments

of metal coming out of it, if these words were your best friend's legs,

dangling, you might not care or even wonder whether

or not it was only the man's mother on the other end

of the telephone line. For one thing, it would be

exonerating. Secondly, emasculating (in the metaphorical

sense of male powerlessness, notwithstanding the likelihood

that the mess the metal made of your friend's legs and trousers

has left more than that detached). If this poem had wires for words,

you would want someone to pay. 

 

If this poem had wires coming out of it,

you wouldn't read it.

If these words were made of metal

they could kill us all. But these

are only words. Go on,

they are safe to fold and put into your pocket.

Even better, they are safe

to be forgotten.

Self-Portrait in Sidewalk Chalk

Once, when seeing

my shadow on the ground

I tried to outline it

in chalk. It kept moving

as I knelt, and as the sun

moved itself from horizon

to horizon, the chalk

was changed.

  

It ranged from arm

to curve of elbow,

from my altered

organs to the shadow

that a church bell cast

beneath the movement

of the sun.

  

It finally fell

and evening came

and dark spread

into the wide world.

My shadow disappeared,

disloyal, and the chalk

showed only myself

strapped monstrously

into a chair.

A History of Yards

My mother, in the porch light, sets out

two tea services in the tilted dirt

of her yard, gently rests the porcelain cups

and saucers in two places near level, seems

not to be watching the bloom of azaleas

first submission to air, but is and has been.

  

I am far from her. Not hearing the mortars

descending and knowing no way of explaining

what it means to be mortared, I lie

in a courtyard eight thousand miles distant

and remember she's watching as she has been

each morning since I promised not to die.

  

I open my body. She shakes out the heat

of the kettle, watches steam rise; ascending, diffusing—

she cannot tell and would not if she could, and remains

in the soil in the four a.m. air beneath six rows

of dogwoods and watches two blooms in one moment: 

 

mine, in the dust. She is driving her body

beneath the soil of her garden

as far as she can, not knowing I never

took cover; ears already ringing

yet somehow still hearing her voice

that I held as a child saying
never be afraid

  

to love everything
. She, beneath

the porch light, watches

my body open,

the daylight becoming equal to it.

Death, Mother and Child

Mosul, Iraq, 2004

Kollwitz was right. Death is an etching.

I remember the white Opel being

pulled through the traffic circle on the back of a wrecker,

the woman in the driver's seat

so brutalized by bullets it was hard to tell her sex.

Her left arm waved unceremoniously

in the stifling heat and I retched,

the hand seemingly saying,
I will see

you there
. We heard a rumor that a child

was riding in the car with her, had slipped

to the floorboard, but had been killed as well.

The truth has no spare mercy, see. It is this chisel

in the woodblock. It is this black wisp

above the music of a twice-rung bell.

Field Manual

Think not of battles, but rather after,

when the tremor in your right leg

becomes a shake you cannot stop, when the burned man's

tendoned cheeks are locked into a scream that,

before you sank the bullet in his brain to end it,

had been quite loud. Think of how he still seems to scream.

Think of not caring. Call this “relief.”

  

Think heat waves rising from the dust.

Think days of rest, how the sergeant lays

the .22 into your palm and says the dogs

outside the wire have become a threat

to good order and to discipline:

some boys have taken them as pets, they spread

disease, they bit a colonel preening for a TV crew.

  

Think of afternoons in T-shirt and shorts,

the unending sun, the bite of sweat in eyes.

Think of missing so often it becomes absurd.

Think quick
pop,
yelp, then puckered fur.

Think skinny ribs. Think smell.

Think almost reaching grief, but

not quite getting there.

After Leaving McGuire Veterans' Hospital for the Last Time

This is the last place you'll ever think

you know. You would be wrong of course.

There is time enough to find

other rooms to be reminded of,

other windows to look out,

chipped sills to lean against

that rub your elbows raw. January

is not so cold here as it is elsewhere,

a little gift. When the wind blows it is

its music you remember, not its chill

as it shakes the empty branches and arrives

wherever wind arrives. Go there then, there.

Follow the long and slender blacktop as

it struggles east along the banks

through sprawling fog not destined

to survive its movement in the morning

toward the sea. And toward the sea

the sound of singing ceases, silences

beginning with a sputter and a cough

as the driver of the truck you hitchhiked in

pulls off, and one more cloud of dust

in your life of clouds of dust disintegrates

as evening settles in. What song is this?

you remember the immigrant clinician asked,

and now again along a shoreline in the night

you realize your life is just a catalog

of methods, every word of it an effort

to stay sane. Count to ten whenever

you begin to shake. If pain of any kind

is felt, take whatever is around

into your hands and squeeze, push

your feet as far as they will go

into the earth. Burial is likely what

you're after anyway. If it's unseemly,

these thoughts, or the fact that the last

unstained shirt you wore was on

a Tuesday, a week ago or more, do not

apologize. If you've earned anything

it is the right to be unseemly

while you decide at what point

the bay becomes the ocean, what

is the calculus of change required

to find what's lost if what is lost

is you. Is that a song you hear

out there, where the reeds begin

to end on every curvature of coast,

is its refrain asking what you will remember,

or is it saying, no, don't tell, ever?

You'll realize you're clinging

to a tree islanded amidst a brackish sea

of bulrush, the call of whip-poor-wills

and all the emptiness you asked for.

No reply: the nautilus repeats

its pattern, a line of waves

beats on forever as you enter them.

Somewhere a woman washes clothes

along the rocks. It was true

what you said. You came home

with nothing, and you still

have most of it left.