Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting Read online

  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.

  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

  Images anesthetize.

  —Susan Sontag

  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 f
irst,

  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