Station Zed (3 page)

how the kids liked to torment her, shouting out,

“You old white bitch!” which she returned with her slurs—

or think of Tiberius’s apparent modesty in refusing

the groveling Senate’s honors, the way his outward show

of virtue—he forbade all public kissing—

gave morality a high tone: did his power

at last unmask him? So that he found relief

in training little boys to swim under

and between his legs, little licking, nibbling fishes, while

nursing babies were given his cock to suck and highborn

Roman women he raped he put on trial

if they fought against him so that one stabbed herself

to be free of his lust; or during a religious sacrifice

he was so taken by the acolyte that he rushed him off

and his flute-playing brother too, not even

waiting for the priest to finish, and afterward,

when they complained, he had their legs broken.

And in affairs of state, his cruelty watched

over twenty executions in a day, the bodies dragged

with hooks into the Tiber, and any man whose estate he coveted

could only find relief from his threats by cutting his own throat.

That’s one version of Rome the histories tell—

the same as my version of my aunt is certainly not

how she’d tell it. Which makes the raven’s shadow

perched above the Capitol an inkblot shape that can turn

into a nightmare, even as its feathers split into rainbows

the spectra of the sun. Flying home one day, the raven shit

from the air and soiled the shoes of the shoemaker

next door, and the man killed the bird, the records don’t

say how, whether with a stone or poison

or a net or strangled or crushed by the man’s hands.

The people of Rome flocked to the man’s home,

they drove him from the neighborhood,

they lynched him—while the bird’s funeral was celebrated

with pomp: a black-draped bier was carried

on sturdy shoulders of two Ethiopians as a flute-player led

them past masses of funeral flowers heaped up

on the way to the pyre built on the right-hand side

of the great Appian Road at the second milestone, on what has

the unlikely name the Rediculus Plain spelled not

with an “i” but an “e”—after the Roman god Rediculus,

deity of returning travelers and of opening and closing

doors, who shut the door on the raven’s tomb. And just as the door

was sealed, the risen ghost of Christ came passing by and, meeting

at the bird’s pyre his disciple Peter

who would soon be asking to be nailed to his own cross

upside down so as not to compete with his master,

told Peter that He, the Son of Man,

King of the Jews, was a dark bird of omen

returning to Rome to be crucified a second time.

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass,

I wasn’t sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,

but he seemed to come apart, not literally

I mean, but I couldn’t see him whole:

Mane. Teeth. The slung belly pumping

as he panted and began to roar. His balls

sheathed in fur swaying a little. His tail’s tuft

jerking in an arc like an old-time pump handle

rusted in mid-air. Somebody or something

I read once said that when Jesus had his vision

of what his father, God, would do to him,

that Jesus could only see pieces of a cross,

pieces of a body appearing through flashes

of sun, as if the body in his vision

was hands looking for feet, a head for a torso,

everything come unmagnetized from the soul:

the lion caught me in his stare not at

or through me but fixated on the great chain

of being that Jesus couldn’t see and that

a zebra might gallop in—black and white stripes

marking longitudes of this world turning

to meat, bloody meat—this vision of an inmate

that Jesus’s father helped to orchestrate by

making a cageless cage with glass instead

of bars—though the lion didn’t seem to care,

he was roaring for his keepers to bring

him food, so everything’s what it should be

if you’re a lion. Nor did the sea lion

seem concerned about having gone a little

crazy, barking incessantly so I could see

the plush, hot pink insides of its throat,

though like the lion through the glass

there’s this distortion, my reflection

I’m looking through that makes me float above

the zoo: and now this silence at closing time

pours like a waterfall in different zones

of silences that, pouring through my head,

surround roaring, barking, human muttering—

is any of that what being sounds like?

Or is it just animal gasping like what

Jesus must have heard from the thieves

hanging beside him, one damned, one saved?

What was in his heart when his vision

clarified and he saw it was a hand he

recognized that the nail was driving through?

You know those twins hanging on the corner,

they look like me and my twin brother

when we were younger, in our twenties,

the paler one like me, sickly, more uptight,

but weirdly aristocratic, more distant

than the one like you, Tim, who, if

you were him would put his arm around me

with that casualness and gentleness

I’ve always craved between us, which we

nearly lost in our twenties but got back

in our fifties now that death’s in my face

when I look at it at just the right angle:

then your smile’s so open, Tim, that we go

back even further, to when we were

boys listening on the stairs to our older

brother telling us about girls, what

you could do with them, what they’d do

with you … not much like our board games

when all we’d think about was rolling

the dice and moving the metal dog or battleship

round and round the squares, counting out loud,

intent on winning … but these past few days

your eyes keep confronting me in the mirror,

your glance full of a goofball happiness!

And the wreath of poppies around your head

grazes my forehead too, and like the dope

I used to shoot, the clear dose in the syringe

lets me down into my body like I’m deep

inside your body, the two of us together

fed by the same blood, waking, sleeping,

nestled next to each other, thumbs in our mouths—

but it only lasts a little while, this feeling

of me inside you inside that liquid warmth

up the back of my neck and down toward

my cock, the high moving at its own sweet will—

Tim, I’ll only belong to you forever

when the other brother, the pale and stern

and faceless one who holds the needle still

when I slide it into the vein and smiles back

my smile, I’ll only belong to him too when he,

in some parody of an old rocker in a crowd

of old rockers holding up lit cigarette lighters,

snaps shut that flickering: oh sure,

to sleep is good, to die is even better,

but the best is never to have been born.

In all the cafés

on the seafront

whatever could be seen

kept exploding in riots

of blue, red, green—

horns everywhere hooting

for the ball soaring

toward the net.

Slicks of trash

and plastic glinting

from the waves, the world

was in a fever

to see the perfect goal,

the giant screens

on every corner

loud with the locust thrum

of satellite hookups.

Between two limestone cliffs

I plunged into the filth,

sucked a mouthful

of oil

and set out

swimming hard

to where I heard

rising voices

shouting in Arabic

Score Score
.

A big wave swept

me under,

another and another,

until I shot out

of the water that gleamed

like a forehead butting mine,

expert but without malice

threatening to drag me down

until I slid out on the rocks.

I shivered, and wanted to live

in the clear light

of the announcers’ voices

echoing in different languages

weaving a net so fine

the sun could pass through it—

yet you could see

in instant replay

the ball caught and caught

and caught, and not one stitch

of that fabric

going taut.

When one of the soldiers asked me about my fever,

despite the fact that I was almost seeing double,

and I couldn’t get my head clear of the zebra

I’d seen killed by lions the day before—

the zebra

on its side, striped legs jerking, twitching, as their heads

disappeared, necks shoved up to the shoulders

into its belly—

I said,
No, the fever’s better
,

let’s go for a ride
.

 So he put me on the back

of his motorbike, an ancient Honda 160

with blown-out baffles so it made a rackety,

popping roar that split my head in two.

The old Somali poet, as we took off, was still reciting

his poem about wanting to go home:

beard stiff

with henna, his old pants immaculately clean

despite the dust and living in a hut with a floor

made of flattened out CARE cardboard

from unpacked medical supplies.

The United States must help us
, he sang,

and,
What do you have for me, now that I have taken time

from my busy schedule to sing for you?

I had nothing to give him and so I smiled

a sort of hangdog smile—which was when the soldier said:

How is your fever? Would you like to go for a ride?

Dust and wind and engine-throb blacked out

any sound so we were completely cocooned

in our own cloud, muffling grayness spreading

ear to ear—

my arms wrapped around the soldier’s waist,

his sweating shirtback drying into my sweating shirtfront,

we passed the compound where an hour ago

I heard a woman tell the registration officer,

nervously giggling through the translator’s English,

that she’d been “done to”—

a young woman with large eyes,

solidly built, holding a cell phone she kept

looking down at as if expecting it to ring—

while other women at other desks stared into

digital cameras taking their photos,

biometric scans of face and fingerprints,

fingerprints then inked the old-fashioned way

into a dossier, questions and answers,

any known enemies, was your husband

or brother part of a militia, which militia?

Faces looking back from computer screens

logging each face into the files, 500 each day

lining up outside the fences, more and more

wanting in as the soldier and the motorbike’s

grit and oil-fume haze stinging my skin

cast a giant shadow-rider riding alongside us,

human and machine making a new being

not even a hyena, who eats everything,

even the bones, could hold in its jaws.

Nostrils parching, the gouged road drifted deep

made my fever rear back as the bike

hit a rise and fishtailed, almost crashing

into a pothole while I hung on

tighter, not in the least bit scared, as if all my fever

could take in was what the single-cylinder

two-stroke piston inside its housing kept on

shouting,
Now that you have come here
,

do you like what you see? Is this your first time?

Are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired? Sad? Sick? Happy?

In places where I am and he isn’t,

in places where he is and I’m not, if

he’s survived, if his baby teeth have grown

past rudiments of mouthing, now he bites

and chews, his will driven by craving for what

might be there and might not in the food sacks

that if you put your head in them smell not

at all, as if the grain weren’t real, or made

of molecules extraterrestrial, a substance

never seen on earth before, a substance

that in the huge warehouse rises in

a pyramid, grain sacks stacked into

a mock Pharaoh’s tomb so if a human-headed

bird with an infant’s face should fly up

in green-winged splendor sprouting from bony

shoulderblades and feathering his neck

muscles so exhausted they minutely

tremble, unable to hold his head

upright for more than a few seconds, wouldn’t it

be hard, almost impossible, for his winged
Ba

to dissolve into
Akh
where his molecules bend

into beams of light?—and so he stays in
Duat
,

nothing transfigured, as in this moment:

to get a better look at me, steel turtle head

in flak jacket, he cocks his head almost

like a bird’s, his sidelong famine gawk,

as he lies listless in his mother’s lap,

coming back into focus when the woman

from
Médecins Sans Frontières
gives him