Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting

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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

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.