Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting Read online

  the whole lot of it had been abandoned, more or less.

  A few bums hadn’t gotten the message

  that the civic venture was a failure, one or two

  unremarkable concerts had occurred, a couple of yuppies

  were still rumored to be living, all alone, in the penthouse

  apartment of a renovated tobacco warehouse, there was

  a stink about a parking lot that had been laid

  over a slave burial ground. Nevertheless,

  the sun was bright in the sky and the bums

  dangled their fingertips in the canal’s green water,

  and apparently some landlord was still paying

  to have the grass kept green and mowed.

  My father had been buried not far

  from there. No one sang at his wake.

  The absence seemed improper, deep in misery or not,

  like it was just as well for us to see song

  buried with him. I passed the statue

  of Christopher Newport as I left, as I had

  that day with my father. I can’t recall

  feeling any different, though I probably did,

  having learned in the intervening period that besides

  being an accidental founder of this city, he was also

  a pirate and a murderer of indigenous peoples.

  If I’m honest, I don’t think I cared.

  If I’m honest, mine is the only history

  that really interests me, which is unfortunate,

  because I am not alone.

  Church Hill

  Watch how the drivers on the hill

  make a blinking semaphore

  of hazard lights, car horns and the idle

  movement of their engines,

  and pause beside the church

  that gave the hill its name,

  from which you once could see

  the river and a city built

  at a bend which reminded

  some back then of another

  on the Thames. So much

  is made of likenesses.

  Now a parade of candles held aloft are cupped

  with a reverence for the melted wax

  as the candles disappear to nubs.

  There is an earnestness of being there

  that I can’t understand.

  Some say only vigils are alarming now;

  each cause for grief becomes

  a public play, improving on the passé

  tragedy of dirt. If you undress

  the earth right here, attempt

  to excavate the hill, you will find

  that every human wish

  is buried there, underneath

  the Georgian houses, under too

  the veneer of asphalt

  that hides a catalog of graves

  the paraders somehow still recall,

  perhaps with a sense

  that there is imperfection

  in anything that’s made,

  or that the alleged ghosts

  are all that remain

  of an abandoned field hospital,

  where now there is a sketchy park

  with a seesaw and a too-loose set

  of monkey bars, where once

  there was a pile of discarded limbs

  stacked to the exact height at which

  they could hold themselves aloft.

  An entire train was later buried

  underneath the hill. A tunnel,

  poorly built, collapsed. At some point

  everyone stopped trying

  to dig the survivors out and went back

  to whatever it was they’d done before,

  despite the fact that witnesses attest

  to having heard, for days after,

  a muffled noise that seemed

  to mimic human speech,

  and later still, the quiet ringing

  of the Pullman’s bell.

  Everything’s exhausting.

  No one should be blamed for this.

  The parade is over anyway.

  All that’s left of whatever grief there was

  is the splotchy wax of melted candles,

  some plastic cups tossed into a gutter,

  a line of cars disappearing into other

  darknesses, the echo in the church

  of the reenacted speech that Patrick Henry gave

  making a nation out of violence.

  If I remember right the church bell rang.

  Everything was silent

  to the west.

  Nominally

  Every beginning is just a course correction,

  the loosest string of the as yet untangled knot, the last

  thought not yet lost and so worth playing out

  as I wait for some new sadness to begin.

  As in, down in the valley where I’m from there is

  a parking lot, which covers up a grave,

  a name we give in singular for the hundred slaves

  they buried there back then. And I am unmoved by the cold

  cardinality of this, and all the marks the waves

  wore into the outer walls of factories

  when the last flash flood that briefly threatened us

  came through in ’98. I stand beneath the interstate

  as it rumbles overhead and disappears.

  There were some names here once.

  Some children, too. So what? Nothing

  was counted. Order is a myth.

  Corona

  Four p.m., Late Empire, the historians will write,

  the child on the banks of the James

  creating a kingdom in his mind

  first brings tyranny into the realm

  at the end of a kite string, tugging

  it this way and that, disinterestedly,

  until the kite moving across the sky

  becomes a symbol of abjection,

  a disgrace, and is hated by the kingdom’s

  living god and only subject. In none

  of the many volumes written in the boy king’s honor

  do they mention the ball of infant snakes

  that startled him by drifting out from under

  the log on which he stood, causing him

  to let loose the string of the kite, but then again,

  neither do they tell of the great fire that began

  a hundred and fifty years before in a tobacco warehouse

  across from where he stood and spread

  to every corner of the city until the glow

  of the remaining embers was seen

  as an ominous beacon by the rebel lookouts on Spy Rock,

  a point two hundred miles or more to the west

  in the Appalachian Mountains. Shrug,

  if you must; history is made of such omissions.

  If we had paid more attention

  we would not know more. If we were distracted

  in the middle kingdom by a cloud

  passing over the sun, obscuring

  our view of the kite and the city skyline,

  now rebuilt, as was the king in his regal isolation,

  it would be understood as a natural failing,

  one that would perhaps imbue our lives

  with greater meaning, but it would not be true.

  We would not know how the boy king,

  years later, without heirs, would consider

  his reign a failure, for how brief it was, an hour,

  at best an afternoon, at worst the time it took

  for that cloud to pass and dissipate, and he

  would watch himself walk down the cobblestone streets,

  the lamps forever gaslit, the footpaths of his life

  as yet unweathered by the soles of his imagined subjects’

  feet, nor by the pair of egrets who flapped their wings above

  the river, nor by the long carp swimming out where it became

  a brackish estuary, nor by the kite

&n
bsp; flown off into the unverifiable distances.

  An Alternate History of the Destruction of Dresden by Fire

  “Them that dwell carelessly, rejoice!” the headline said.

  Saying not that

  the deaf child lived, but died a moment after seeing the planes’ stark gleam.

  The bombers’ bombs fell past the gunners in their balls, as each tallied his

  mission and each thought was released once fell. Below in Dresden it was cold

  and the breath of the citizens and the breath of zoo animals stirred skyward

  like steam rising in cadence from this strange menagerie that breathed.

  Even the deaf child thought he felt the thunder of a hum and stood, signing

  to the zookeeper, signing to his parents “Was ist das?” as they turned west

  and watched the sky fill up with bright, metallic, February reflections

  of the sun off planes. Past the Elbe the sky filled with a thousand tired

  boys from Richmond, boys from Birmingham, from Detroit and York,

  holding their breath as the flak exploded all around and they waited

  to die. Seconds below, the deaf child smiled and turned to a brown bear

  pacing through the new mute snow and said “Bar, ich höre!”

  before he seared through the sound of Dresden burning

  and a cub was born crying: toothless, blind and bald.

  Portugal

  When my mother spoke she gave

  me consciousness. The black sight of

  cormorants nesting in rocks, sea-beat

  and flowering out of green water,

  knees me to earth. Thus was I taught

  to pray—root your knees in the earth.

  Between clasped fingers I see the sun

  fall into the Atlantic and am afraid.

  Red, like a wound bled into water,

  mixes with my mother’s voice,

  Não há bela sem senão. I am told

  those words were first to reach my ears

  but mine was a murdering birth. When I look

  into the ocean I am afraid. When I turn

  to my mother’s grave, a hole in the dirt

  beneath cork oak and wheat, I am afraid

  because the edge of a peninsula is a great mass

  of earth—so much to put my mother in,

  so much with which to cover her.

  Advice to Be Taken Just Before the Sun Goes Supernova

  Take three buses anywhere.

  Ignore the location of each transfer.

  Be prepared to exit any one of them

  at random. Everyone is where they are

  by accident; they will likely be as scared

  as you are. Try to have your thoughts by chance.

  Remember the encrypted book by Bacon

  that you heard of once, how its

  calfskin pages held a perfect drawing

  of cells at magnification and three nudes

  dancing in a ring around the edges

  of the page. No one’s ever going to read it.

  Step out onto the dirty skin

  of town again. Think of how each city

  that you’ve been in seems the same.

  There, a building tilted to appease

  the ego of an old unnoticed architect.

  Here, a man, you, turning to look

  at trash collecting in the intersections.

  Nothing changes. Each way you look

  there is a toll, within each booth

  a man sits behind a curtain, behind

  each window you are reflected

  in an oddly overlapping way,

  you find a tunnel and shout to hear

  the sound of your voice echo off its echo

  as if to verify that you are more than just

  another piece of sacking added to the swirl

  of forgotten objects swinging round

  a million little masses we can’t see;

  but you are not, and I promise

  someone will love you anyway.

  A Lamp in the Place of the Sun

  A complete picture of the universe

  as it currently exists

  is not impossible,

  only difficult. The warmth

  of any kind of light

  is just an effigy of history,

  each star the record of

  a million, million cities

  waiting to be burned

  and lived in once again.

  And farther into all

  our darkened rooms

  we go, as though in them

  we might remember

  something: where it was

  we left the house key,

  who it was that slept

  in the small ocean of our bed,

  and why we loved

  their sleeping, why the door

  seems different now

  and unafraid

  of being opened.

  How long I waited

  for the end of winter.

  How quickly I forgot

  the cold when it was over.

  Grace Note

  It’s time to take a break from all that now.

  No use the artifacts

  from which I’ve built the buried outline of a life,

  no use the broken breath

  which I recall from time to time

  still rattles in my chest. Yes, we’re due:

  a break from everything, from use,

  from breath, from artifacts, from life,

  from death, from every unmoored memory

  I’ve wasted all those hours upon

  hoping someday something will make sense:

  the old man underneath the corrugated plastic

  awning of the porch, drunk and slightly

  slipping off into the granite hills

  of southeast Connecticut already, the hills sheaved off

  and him sheaved off and saying

  (in reply to what?) “Boy, that weren’t nothing

  but true facts about the world.”

  That was it. The thing I can’t recall

  was what I had been waiting for.

  It likely won’t come back again.

  And I know better than to hope,

  but one might wait

  and pay attention

  and rest awhile,

  for we are more than figuring the odds.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to the magazines and journals that previously published some of the poems in this collection. I am also grateful to the faculty and staff at both the Michener Center for Writers and Virginia Commonwealth University, especially Jordan Rice, Gary Sange, Dean Young, and Jim Magnuson. To the many friends who read some or all of these poems, I say thanks, and thanks most of all to Carolina Ebeid, Shamala Gallagher, and Leanna Petronella. I have had the good fortune to work on this collection with a number of extraordinary people at Little, Brown and Company, including Victoria Matsui, Michael Pietsch, Nicole Dewey, and Morgan Moroney. Also, to everyone at RCW, especially Peter Straus, your friendship and guidance are both buoying and indispensable. Finally, to my wife and family, all my love, forever.

  About the Author

  Kevin Powers is the author of the novel The Yellow Birds, which was a National Book Award finalist, a PEN/Hemingway Award winner, and a Guardian First Book Award winner. Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. This is his first collection of poetry.

  Also by Kevin Powers

  The Yellow Birds

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Dedication

  OneCustoms

  Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

  Great Plain

  Inheritance

  Blue Star Mother

  Independence Day

  Valentine with Flat Affect

  Elegy for Urgency

  Meditation on a Main Supply Route

  TwoImprovised Explosive Device

  Self-Portrait in Sidewalk Chalk

  A History of Yards

  Death, Mother and Child

  Field Manual

  After Leaving McGuire Veterans’ Hospital for the Last Time

  Separation

  Actuary

  Photographing the Suddenly Dead

  ThreeCumberland Gap

  The Torch and Pitchfork Blues

  Fighting out of West Virginia

  In the Ruins of the Ironworks

  Songs in Planck Time

  The Abhorrence of Coincidence

  While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians

  FourThe Locks of the James

  Church Hill

  Nominally

  Corona

  An Alternate History of the Destruction of Dresden by Fire

  Portugal

  Advice to Be Taken Just Before the Sun Goes Supernova

  A Lamp in the Place of the Sun

  Grace Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Kevin Powers

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Powers

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,