by Kevin Powers
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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 The world has been replaced
by our ideas about the world.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
&
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,
