Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (3 page)

Separation

I want the boys at the end of the bar

to know, these Young Republicans

in pink popped-collar shirts, to know

that laughter drives me mad

and if one must be old

before one dies, then we were

old. Nineteen or twenty-three

and we were old and now

as the fan spins and the light

shines off their gelled hair and

nails, I want to rub their clean

bodies in blood. I want my rifle

and I want them to know

how scared I am still, alone

in bars these three years later when

I notice it is gone. I want the boys

at the end of the bar to know

that my rifle weighed eight pounds

when loaded and on my first day

home I made a scene in a bar,

so drunk that I screamed and

wept and begged for someone

to give it back. “How will I return

fire?” I cried. I truly cried.

But no one could give it back

because it was gone and I felt

so old: twenty-four and crying

for my rifle and the boys

at the end of the bar

were laughing.

Actuary

The burnt pan

I have begun to cook my bacon in

is stripped and smells somehow of lilies,

open white and wide

on the table by the window.

I do not know

why this should or should not be so.

It is just another bafflement

in a world

built out of bafflement.

  

Outside it is winter

once again, unseasonably warm.

The air is uniform

and I can hardly even tell

if it is inside or outside of

my body as I breathe it. If I do not

go back to it, the house will burn.

If I do not go back to it,

I will never know

what mattered.

Photographing the Suddenly Dead

Fact: anything invented must someday circle back

to its beginning: one puff of smoke as a lanyard

is let go, which precedes the leaning out

from underneath a hood, adapting

to the newness of the light

after so much time

in the finite darkness

that the hood had made

so carefully, as if it alone

could be the difference

between life and every other form

of composition.

  

Know, too, there is a photograph

at the bottom of an abandoned duffel bag

left on purpose underneath

whatever unused items

take up space

in an aging mother's

rarely opened-up garage.

  

At night, above it, there are stars.

I've seen them. Any claim of permanence

must kneel before this fact, and kneel too

before the puff of smoke that made

the picture happen.

  

What does it mean to say,

I made this
? Must I claim

both the image and the act?

One, the killing

of three young men whose crime

was an unwillingness

to apply the brakes in time

to stop before arriving

at a checkpoint.

  

The other, a simple flash

and click, a record of

a broken arm and blood,

a rusted rifle and a shot-up car,

a certain quality of light

as it refracted through the dust

that lingered high above

the wadi where they ended up,

soon to be on fire.

Someone laughed as it was taken.

Everyone wave good-bye,

we said and laughed again

when our relief arrived.

  

We no longer have to name

the sins that we are guilty of.

The evidence for every crime

exists. What one

must always answer for

is not what has been done, but

for the weight of what remains

as residue—every effort

must be made to scrub away

the stain we've made on time.

  

Brady, for one, never made a photo

of a battle as it happened. At first,

too much stillness was required

to fix the albumin in place.

In the end the dead, unburied

and left open to the air,

were committed to the light

as it reacted to the mostly

silver nitrate mix. I wonder

if it was someone's job

to check a watch, to time it all,

or what it meant that Brady,

almost blind as war began,

would let himself go bankrupt too,

just to get the process right.

  

I found that it was not enough

to leave that day behind

at the bottom of a duffel bag,

or to linger in the backyard

by my mother's pond, trying to replace

what I imagined were its fading edges

with a catalog

of changing leaves in fall,

each shifting color captured

in a frame, one shutter opened

to a drowned and dying oak,

the next, the water

it was drowning in.

Nor would it be enough

to have myself for months secluded

in the dark rooms

of an apartment

I'd wound up paying for up front,

desperate for anything

to keep out light, a sometimes

loaded gun,

and whatever solitude

I needed to survive

the next unraveling,

undocumented instant.

Three

Cumberland Gap

I first realized I was evaporating

when I was twelve, having heard

  

for the first time the word
embarcadero,

from some boy leafing through a battered copy

  

of a triple A road atlas tucked onto a shelf,

one volume in the series of books of maps

  

that had for a long time composed

the section of the library devoted to geography.

  

It was a place, but not in any real sense

except the one I'd guessed at, the exotic newness

  

of a word that finished with a vowel, and if I,

in the library of a worn-out-already rural school,

  

created in my mind a picture that could be called

a fair approximation of the place as it existed,

  

the long line of the esplanade falling off

into the distances, perhaps the fine grey of

  

the Pacific reaching through the uncertainty of fog,

and then at night, the book of maps now left

  

open on a table, I could create the bustle

of a group of stars that never were. I'd be called

  

lucky, or just dead wrong, and for a moment,

motionless, I'd be clearly drawn to scale upon the page

  

with just the clarity that I had hoped for, not knowing

the fruitlessness of having clarity among one's hopes.

  

When the librarian called my name my name

was made into a kind of spell, dispersing everything

  

I could identify or claim as being part

of one certain, undisputed me, the long walk

  

down the hall as she held my hand, deferring

every question I might ask until a later time,

  

and I remember the bright red dust of dried-up clay

that swung in liquid-looking rivulets as I sat

  

in the parking lot and waited for my father's Chevy to appear,

knowing only that someone was dying, thinking only

  

of the word
embarcadero,
any place other than the place

I was forced to occupy in time and space, any name

  

of any town whose weight could be abandoned

with enough repeating, and giving up at last, the last

  

of the other children gone, hearing in my father's voice

his philosophy of living, always buy a Chevy, son,

  

those goddamn Fords are designed for obsolescence,

the plan, see, is in five years it'll break down

  

and you'll have to buy another, and I asked if it was like

the broken bicycle he'd bought for me that we'd repaired

  

one piece at a time until it worked, how when

we screwed the last bolt onto the new sprocket

  

the old bike was no longer there, everything replaced,

the broken pieces set aside and what did it mean,

  

and his face, which I remember over everything, lined

with a map-like certainty of shame because he had no answer,

  

offered none, and then the tracks of the Chevy's tires

turned up the dust again, the pine trees bright and luminous

  

with their late spring blanketing of pollen underneath

the unreal quality of light in which we lived, until I climbed

  

into the seat beside him, that rag he had

by then begun to cough into

already resting on his knee.

The Torch and Pitchfork Blues

Whoever picks up the last of the thrown jacks

while the ball still bounces off the pavement

and hangs suspended in the kicked-up playground dust

must also retrieve the history of the ground

where it will land. There are rules. Tell us,

boy, called out on eenie, if you

have guessed them yet. Before there was

brushed nickel there was iron, before

Tommy Dunlap was pushed idly from the bus

into that busy intersection, there was

a plenitude of grief already. Measured

against all that, a single incident recedes

into no biggie, just a memory that will help

to make his fourth-grade classmates cautious,

for a time at least, until they can no longer take

the weight of that third and fourth look down the street

when crossing into any kind of danger.

It doesn't matter, can't, and even if the impact

of that moment could be measured, we cannot say

with any certainty that Sara Albertson,

ten years after, could have resisted

making dainty track marks in the crook

of her elbow, between her toes, and I have heard,

when it was at its worst, into her eyes.

  

Who could have known, of the children

gathered in a circle, picking for a game of jacks,

that the ground on which they walked

had once been furrowed by a group of,

well, you-know-whos. Who among them

could have known? Well, really, any,

had they been even half-aware in class,

had they opened up their textbooks once,

had they heard their fathers say,
If them

niggers keep comin' we're leavin'
.

  

Without the plans for the school, now buried

in the county zoning office basement,

or some historical artifact that would give

the layout of the old plantation, it would be difficult

to say for sure if the fence they crawled under to escape

had been over by the baseball field

or by the lower meadow where the kindergarteners

played that game in gym with a parachute and tennis ball,

the children's arms just barely strong enough

to send it lofting into the blue sky, and them too young

to know not to look directly at it, yellow and hanging

as if by magic, blinding as it reached the apex

of its flight. By Christmas break they would perfect

their method, the whole game now brought indoors,

the children trained to never look again.

You might say they failed to learn the only lesson

any one of them would have ever needed since: that if

anything on earth has earned the right to be observed

it is a thing of beauty while in flight.

You might say. You might say. You might.

Fighting out of West Virginia