by Kevin Powers
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
