Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting Read online

  Begin Reading

  Table of Contents

  Newsletters

  Copyright Page

  In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher constitute unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  For my friends from the Boulevard

  One

  Customs

  Amen may have meant “to begin”

  back then. So be it, the desert, I imagine,

  said. So be it, as the car I’m traveling in

  turns right on state highway 71,

  due west into the vast unending waste

  of Texas.

  Now it only lets us know that things are at an end,

  among them is the sun hung out

  to dry any echo of my voice that would survive

  the turbines’ spinning blades

  as we drift through the windmill field

  and on into Old Mexico.

  We passed the welcome sign

  five miles ago. Another crossing

  missed. On some naked mountainside

  a small signal fire is lit. I can tell you exactly

  what I mean. It is night again and endless

  are the stars. I can tell you exactly

  what I mean. The world has been replaced

  by our ideas about the world.

  Letter Composed During a

  Lull in the Fighting

  I tell her I love her like not killing

  or ten minutes of sleep

  beneath the low rooftop wall

  on which my rifle rests.

  I tell her in a letter that will stink,

  when she opens it,

  of bolt oil and burned powder

  and the things it says.

  I tell her how Private Bartle says, offhand,

  that war is just us

  making little pieces of metal

  pass through each other.

  Great Plain

  Here is where appreciation starts, the boy

  in a dusty velour tracksuit almost getting shot.

  When I say boy, I mean it. When I say almost

  getting shot, I mean exactly that. For bringing

  unexploded mortars right up to us

  takes a special kind of courage I don’t have.

  A dollar for each one, I’m told,

  on orders from brigade HQ

  to let the children do the dirty work.

  When I say, I’d say fuck that, let the bastards find them

  with the heels of boots and who cares if I mean us

  as bastards and who cares if heels of boots mean things

  that once were, the way grass once was a green thing

  and now is not, the way the muezzin call once was

  five times today and now is not

  and when I say heel of boot I hope you’ll appreciate

  that I really mean the gone foot, any one of us

  timbered and inert and when I say green

  I mean like fucking Nebraska, wagon wheels on the prairie

  and other things that can’t be appreciated

  until you’re really far away and they come up

  as points of reference.

  I don’t know what Nebraska looks like.

  I’ve never been. When I say Nebraska

  I mean the idea of, the way an ex-girlfriend of mine

  once talked about the idea of a gun. But guns are not ideas.

  They are not things to which comparisons are made. They are

  one weight in my hand when the little boy crests the green hill

  and the possibilities of shooting him or not extend out from me

  like the spokes of a wheel. The hills are not green anymore

  and in my mind they never were, though when I say they were

  I mean I’m talking about reality. I appreciate that too,

  knowing

  the hills were green,

  knowing

  someone else has paid him

  for his scavenging, one less

  exploding thing beneath our feet.

  I appreciate the fact

  that for at least one day I don’t have to decide

  between dying and shooting a little boy.

  Inheritance

  It is useful to be in love

  with useless things.

  The old pear cactuses that withered

  in our yard when we were young,

  I loved. Among other things, I loved

  the clear glass bottle of

  Old Milwaukee that you threw

  from the window of your car

  into the garbage can

  when you came home,

  loved the way it broke

  into a dozen broken pieces

  and the way a dozen more

  surrounded them

  like constellations, loved

  what dignity there seemed to be

  in the way that any single thing that orbits

  gives up on being more

  than needed for a while.

  Once I loved an old man, too,

  who had no use for useless things,

  like this poem, which might

  be out there spinning

  with him anyway.

  Blue Star Mother

  Compare my sins to this, for instance,

  my mother refusing to have her picture taken,

  always raising up her hands the moment that

  the shutter clicks, so that looking back

  on the photographic

  evidence of my life

  one could be easily convinced

  I was raised by a woman

  whose face was the palm of a hand.

  This is not the case. I know that

  in the seventies she wore

  large glasses, apparently sat often enough

  on cheap imitation teak couches

  to be photographed on them more than once, sometimes

  had her hair done up

  in whatever fashion

  wives of factory workers

  wore in Richmond

  and was beautiful.

  But after hanging her blue star up she covered it

  with curtains. She stopped

  going to the hairdresser

  and took up gardening instead.

  Which is to say that when she woke up

  in the middle of the night

  she’d stand in the yard in her nightgown

  staring at a clump of dead azaleas

  running down beside the house.

  Later, she stopped sleeping.

  Later still, her hair went grey.

  I had a picture of her

  in my helmet, shuffled in

  with other pictures.

  I think it was in between

  some cutouts from

  a Maxim magazine and

  a Polaroid of my girlfriend’s tits

  with a note on it that said,

  Sorry, last one, be safe, XOXO.

  My mother told me

  about a dream she had

  before the sleeping stopped. I died

  and woke her at her bedside

  to tell her I was dead,

  though I would not have

  had to tell her because

  I’d already bled on her favorite floral rug

&
nbsp; and half my jaw was missing.

  I don’t know what to make of that.

  I like to think she caught

  some other mother’s dream,

  because she could take

  how hard the waiting was,

  and had all that practice

  getting up her hands.

  Independence Day

  Sunset: the shadow of the carillon

  had done its covering of us.

  The girl with red hair finally turned toward me

  and the blanket and the grass and the white oaks

  smelled like the furthest thing from memory I

  could have asked for.

  And the ringing I

  did not hear next did not come from the building’s bells,

  but from the sound

  of each ignited shell

  that boxed my ears with its beginning. I

  began to shake and I

  saw the girl with red hair’s eyes

  and that she saw me

  shake and the mouths of whole families

  gone wide and rounded in amazement.

  I do not believe in silence.

  There is no such thing.

  But I

  believed the woman in Ward C of McGuire veterans’ hospital

  who told me to dig

  my feet into the ground as hard as I

  could if I

  ever doubted

  the firmness of reality.

  And I

  had practiced digging down

  and down into the earth

  with my hands

  with my elbows

  with my body

  with my eyes

  gone wide, in fact I

  have tried to become earth

  many times, to be lower than earth, and I

  have known many boys

  who practiced it so much

  that they stayed below the surface.

  So I dig my heels into the green grass, wearing out

  the blanket and the carillon’s lawn and

  I shake, turning

  to the girl with red hair,

  grasping her waist,

  until lastly

  we reach resonance.

  Valentine with Flat Affect

  Everybody knows

  the number of things to be in love with

  is reducing

  at a rate more or less equal to

  the expansion of the universe.

  This is called entropy, I think.

  Some things are, however, left:

  you, in that gingham dress,

  for one, for which

  I will not apologize

  to anyone for loving.

  Other aspects of a life become prioritized

  by chance, and our mistake

  is that we guess that every ground must break

  along the fault

  that it is given.

  So no, I don’t care as much

  about the fish I pulled

  out of the river in a net as I do

  you. Most

  of what I catch slips back

  between

  the empty spaces in the old net

  anyway. It’s hard enough to find

  my footing, let alone

  decide what to call remarkable,

  and not just because I am fed

  and clothed and not unreasonably

  happy.

  Elegy for Urgency

  Sometimes, when the wind blows so certainly

  you feel that it is spring, regardless of the season,

  there is no cause to comment on it. It goes,

  and if it passes over a child

  in a carriage at the end of the sidewalk,

  you would be forgiven for not noticing

  the one moment in your life

  you were allowed to see the holy.

  But you have noticed nothing in a long time,

  holy or otherwise, so it is not remarkable

  that you spent the rest of the day listening blankly

  as your friends and loved ones chattered on,

  unable even to speak,

  the whole time dizzying further, only aware

  of the futility of trying to fix yourself in the world

  with words you cannot remember.

  The names of the trees are trees

  and birds are those singing things

  carrying their music off to a place

  to which you’ve lost the way.

  If your hands were not clasped together

  you could spread out your palms

  and hope that some song might fall

  down into them. You’ve tried.

  If only you could recall the name,

  which you are sure is resting

  right there on the tip of your tongue

  with the rest of your life.

  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.

&nb
sp; 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,