by Tom Sleigh
The sun compressed to a sliver shines through
mesh of my mosquito net that holds back
mosquitos hovering like the souls I don’t believe in
of those who’ve died or have gone missing in the wind’s
unsubtle devastatations—
but the love of lost companions
brings back wet underwear: socks, T-shirts,
boxer shorts, bras, panties, a dhoti
hung from thorn trees to dry in the dawn breeze.
10/ TOO LATE
Here the body is the sheered-off wing of the Trans-Avia plane
lying in a scrapheap
like the knocked-off arm of an old Grecian figurine
of Winged Victory pacing down the deck of Athenian might.
Here, you can let yourself go in so many ways—
the bomb pack strapped to your waist and detonated
by pushing Send on your cell phone.
Or the eternal aesthete in his eternal pursuit
of just the right moment to see
the splintering of light passing through tent mesh
waking you to the unambivalent hate you’ve always craved.
The rivals walk off to where the broken pediments
of the cathedral still brace under the weight of the rose window.
And the body barters for the ghosts pinned down by the shadows
to come rising at this moment from the grave
telling the body it’s too late, it’s always been too late
passing over the ocean’s dry whispering wave.
3
Homage to Bashō
for Christopher Merrill
WHAT I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT MY TRIP MEANDERS the way the Tigris and Euphrates meander, and like those rivers in flood, is sometimes murky in intention, balked in it its conclusions, and flows where it has to flow. In Iraq, in which the customs and conventions were often operating invisibly, or easily misinterpreted to be the same as mine, I suppose I gave up on telling a straightforward story. Instead, one night in a helicopter, what I felt in the air, so different from what was happening on the ground, made me realize that when you take an oath to tell the truth, you’re not telling that truth either to the judge or to the courtroom. Perhaps the point of the oath is to try to surround yourself with a lightness and solitude from which you can speak the truth, adding whatever light and shade you can so as to make “the how” implicate “the why.” After all, the judge and the members of the court weren’t riding in the helicopter, so a realistic description won’t mean anything to anyone unless you add that light and shade which only you, as the witness, could perceive.
But even then, in the helicopter roar, the truth may be hard to hear, even in your own ears.
VILLANELLE ON GOING TO BAGHDAD
Again and again I kept taking a picture of the numbers
and letters on my passport for Deneyse from Texas,
just the same as me, except she was in Baghdad and I was where
I was feeling ridiculous, a real techno-fumbler,
as I downloaded and uploaded and pressed
Send over and over, trying to get the numbers
and letters to come out right: 2211 … and then a lot of blur
that was driving Deneyse crazy: Who is this jackass
that he can’t even use a cell phone? She was stuck where
she was stuck, in the desert in the Green Zone, and here
I was, listening to some unknown bird doing its best
to sound like a wind-up bird while the numbers
and letters got screwed up in the electronic ether—
my cell phone’s camera kept making my passport face
explode with little yellow stars, and I didn’t know where
in what universe they came from, my face like the numbers
and letters and that screeching bird devolving to this creeping sense
of senselessness making me vestigially aware of how numbers
and letters and maybe Deneyse too, despite whatever
she was trained to show as her Embassy face,
were all part of this giant abstraction branching out everywhere
just like a tree that every second keeps getting bigger
until it dwarfed me and her and the bird, dwarfed
the embassy, and my silly attempts to make the numbers
and letters more readable: and then I was aware
of my heart, I mean my real heart, the bloody muscle inside my chest,
beating a little too fast, telling me in a melodramatic way, Beware
the Ides of March! like the soothsayer in Julius Caesar.
And then no bird, no embassy, no Deneyse,
no me—there were just the pictures of letters and numbers
hanging from the tree and Baghdad was a nowhere anywhere.
I FLEW SOUTH TO BASRA IN A DASH 8, an eager little commuter plane with a fifty-seat capacity. The loadmaster—which is Embassy Air speak for the steward—wore wraparounds and a reflective orange and yellow caution vest. “File across the airstrip single file,” he told us. “Avoid the propellers, and climb the stairs into the Dash one pair of feet on the stairs at a time.” The only addition to the safety announcement was the loadmaster warning us that the plane might shoot off decoy flares, and that the explosion we would hear was the sound of the flares deploying. If a heat-seeking, infra-red guided missile was fired at the Dash, automatic sensors would release the flares, either in clusters or one by one, in the hope that the flare’s heat signature, many times hotter than the engine, would decoy the IR missile away from us and after the flare. On an earlier flight to Baghdad, Chris, my pal and fellow traveler, had experienced the release of these flares: “The explosion,” he said, “was really loud, loud enough to hurt your ears, and absolutely terrifying.”
The plane began to taxi down the runway, and Chris and I fell silent as the rattle and roar of the Dash ascending filled the cabin.
GOING TO BASRA
Shamash the sun god, the god of justice who lays bare
the righteous and the wicked when he floods the world
with light, came walking down
the muddy-looking Tigris
into Basra where gas flares from the refineries burning all night long
faded into the Dash 8’s prop
whirring just beyond the window.
So much gas was burning off into the air the plane
was descending through
that a skin of light kept rippling over the city’s cinderblock and rebar
tilting up at the plane’s belly swooping down.
In my book I read how the Deluge made the dykes give way:
the gods crouch like dogs with their tails between their legs,
terrified at the storm-demons they themselves let loose.
At the end of six days and nights, Utnapishtim and his wife
send out a raven that never returns.
The ark runs aground on a mountaintop just above the storm waters
that have beaten the world flat into mud and clay.
And Utnapishtim and his wife offer the gods sweet cane, myrtle, cedar,
and the gods smell the savor,
the gods smell the sweet savor,
the gods hover like flies over the sweetness.
THE PLANE LEVELED OFF AT CRUISING ALTITUDE, and through the pitted glass, I saw the Tigris winding through Baghdad, the city hazy in the morning light. As we flew south, the Euphrates and Tigris, which almost meet in Baghdad, again diverged into widely meandering beds before coming together outside of Basra in a river called the Shatt al-Arab that empties into the Persian Gulf. Field on field of green wheat and barley surrounded small isolated farmsteads nestled inside groves of date palms. Underneath us, I watched the shadow of the Dash ripple across the vast green plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers,” and here and there, you could see long, straight irrigation canals, and artificial rese
rvoirs divided up by dykes, watering the fields. I was astonished to actually be seeing what I had known since grade school as “the cradle of civilization.” I remember reading about cuneiform writing, and thinking that it looked like the marks that a flock of crows’ feet would leave in our muddy garden if it froze solid overnight.
As we began to see the outskirts of Basra, I thought of the great Ziggurat at Ur, and how, twenty-five years ago—and a year or so before the first Gulf War broke out—I’d come across a cuneiform tablet in the Louvre, translated into French, about the destruction of Ur. I copied it out on the back of an envelope, took it home, where it sat on my desk for months while I read the odes of Horace. And then one day, I found it on my desk, and thought that if I could treat it like an Horatian ode, that I might be able to do something with it in English. So via a French translation of an ancient Akkadian original, and utilizing a meter that I’d come across in Horace, I translated a poem into English that I called “Lamentation on Ur.” I hadn’t meant the poem to have overt political overtones—I thought of it as a general comment on the destruction and fragility of civilized life:
LAMENTATION ON UR
—from a Sumerian spell, 2000 BC
Like molten bronze and iron shed blood
pools. Our country’s dead
melt into the earth
as grease melts in the sun, men whose
helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated
by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond
help, they lie still as a gazelle
exhausted in a trap,
muzzle in the dust. In home
after home, empty doorways frame the absence
of mothers and fathers who vanished
in the flames remorselessly
spreading claiming even
frightened children who lay quiet
in their mother’s arms, now borne into
oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea
by the surging current.
May the great barred gate
of blackest night again swing shut
on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,
may this disaster too be torn out of mind.
BUT THEN THE GULF WAR CAME ALONG, and suddenly the poem was taken up as an anti-war poem: so current events had transformed what I thought of as a general statement into a topical, political statement. And soon I would be flying just to the west of the Great Ziggurat, damaged by 400 bullet holes and five large bomb craters made by US warplanes as they bombed a nearby Iraqi airbase.
I remember teaching a class of undergraduates in which a young Iraqi woman, who had lived through the bombardments of Desert Storm, sat among us. The students had no idea that she was from Iraq, nor did I, until she wrote a paper about surviving the bombing. I asked her before class if I could use her paper as part of the discussion, and whether she would mind talking about the bombardment that she had lived through. She agreed, a slight girl wearing a beige head scarf, with perfectly plucked, and absolutely symmetrical eyebrows. She was a very soft-spoken young woman, and her command of English was perfect, though more formal than the English most of the students spoke.
We were reading the Iliad, and were talking about the anatomical particularity with which Homer describes the wounding and death of the individual heroes. I asked them to think about the only war that they knew at that time, the first Gulf War, and to discuss their sense of whether or not, given the images of backs and lungs and livers and bellies pierced through by spearheads, it was possible to justify the slaughter of war, including the civilians killed as “collateral damage.” Almost the entire class, women as well as men, said that it was possible to justify the slaughter, based on American interests abroad, on overcoming dictators for democracy, and on the hope that a better life could come out of battle. I then asked them what they would say to someone who had actually lived through the bombardments to achieve these worthy goals—and that this someone was here, sitting among them, as one of their fellow classmates? How would they explain to their classmate the necessity of the bombs? Silence fell on the room. Everyone looked deeply uncomfortable: I realized that I’d betrayed them, as well as the young Iraqi woman, who sat very still in her seat, though I hadn’t meant to. I’d assumed that there would be at least some opposition to the “just war” thesis, and I was disconcerted when I realized that not one of them had moral qualms, or at least qualms that they were willing to express. And then one boy said, “I guess if I were that person, I’d think that most of what I just said was pretty stupid.” And when I asked the young woman to talk about her experience, she said something like: “We sat in our house with the lights off. The bombs went on for a long time, and when they stopped, all of us were so tired, we went to sleep.” She plucked her head scarf a little further over her hair, fell silent—and then the class ended.
ZIGGURAT
What’s built collapses
to be rebuilt, ruin on top
of ruin piling up into
a ziggurat pocked by shell holes
so that our knowledge is the knowledge
of drifting sand, grit in the cupboard,
grit under the bed where a doll’s head,
button eyes open, lies forgotten.
We will be covered by the dune
and uncovered in time,
our helmet straps wasted away,
metal eaten through—
though we, the fallen, perpetually
on guard, will stare back at you
from the streaked bathroom mirror,
making yourselves presentable to the light of day.
For us, the marshlands drained and turned
to dust will be our present kingdom,
our spectral waterway among the always instant reeds,
shivering, bending to the current.
I PROVED MYSELF TO BE INEPT at putting on my bulletproof vest, attaching this to that in all the wrong places, before figuring out how to velcro the waist panels tightly around my stomach so that they were under the vest, not over it, and adjusting and readjusting the shoulder straps to make sure they were tight. I didn’t look very military: in fact, I looked like I was wearing a bib, a sort of Rambo, Jr.
Now that I was strapped into my vest, it felt fairly light weight, around eight pounds—thick enough, according to the specs, to give reasonable protection against handguns. But when you consider that a bullet fired from a military-style weapon is the equivalent of a five-pound sledgehammer smashing into you at forty-five miles per hour, serious bruising and broken ribs are pretty much guaranteed. I put on my helmet and snapped the chin-snap fast, but I had to keep pushing it back from sliding down over my eyes. Rather than protected, I looked—and felt—like an overgrown infant.
In front of our armored vehicle—a Chevy Suburban SUV reinforced with steel plating—a beefy, but terminally polite security contractor dressed in khakis, a brown knit shirt, a gray windbreaker, lightweight hikers, and sporting a buzz-cut, gave us a briefing: “Once you’re inside the vehicle, please stay away from the doors. We’ll let you in and out. If we take fire, or if I give you the signal to get down, I’d appreciate it if you could get on the bottom of the vehicle. I’ll climb in back with you and cover you. Once we get to our destination, you can leave your armor and helmets in the vehicle. Then we’ll open the doors, and we’ll proceed single file to our destination. Everything clear?”
CAR COVER
The car cover blown halfway off the car
billows and bags, sagging back
to a slack void before being blown wide
open, almost as if a man, or a man and woman,
or a woman and her soldier
wrestled over and over, amorous
and/or murderous
in the cold Brooklyn wind, the weak Christmas Day sun
lighting in stark shadow the shredded
plastic bags billowing in leafless branches
above what keeps billowing
below, a duet
singing what’s above
to what’s below, sky and earth concentrating
all their powers on what could be three, or four,
or countless small wars
rolling over the earth’s surface
the way the canvas rolls in the animating wind,
the corners at war with the center
they want to tear free of, the center
tugging and yanking at the corners—
but it’s all just a piece of canvas sewn
to fit over roof and windshield and hug bumper
and headlights, so ingeniously
tailored that even this small skill rebukes me
for my seeing in its roiling
sullen gas flares
breaking out all over the earth, and the security contractors
who are paid to keep me safe
wearing their in-ear radio receivers
hearing what’s going on out there as we move
in the armored Suburban among the lucky and the doomed
until one or the other or both
lie still as the car cover
going slack over the skin of the abandoned car.
IN ONE OF OUR WORKSHOPS, a slight young woman wearing a black and white headscarf, with a round face and large black eyes, and with just a hint of mascara on the lashes, stood up to read her poem. Her name, I think, was Mariam, and she stood very straight in front of her classmates, and read to us with a quiet, unself-conscious dignity. Her pronunciation was excellent so I have a good memory of what she wrote. She said that she was woken near dawn by her older brother in her bedroom, who had bent down to gently kiss her on the cheek, and to ask her if she wanted anything special in the market. And when she looked up at him, to tell him “No,” he said to her, very gently, that this would be the last time she’d be seeing him. But she was so sleepy, she didn’t quite take in what he meant, and a moment later he was gone. Later that morning, she wrote, she was in the kitchen having breakfast with her mother. And then their neighbor came in and gave them the news. She wrote that as she heard the news, she felt herself get smaller and disappear: she had no hands, no face, no body to feel with. There was no kitchen, no mother, no her. The neighbor, she wrote, told them about the “car accident.” She wrote how she remembers her brother’s words coming back to her, how gentle he was when he kissed her on the cheek, how he would always bring her special things from the market. And then she sat down, seeming completely self-possessed, except for the sadness that had come into her voice and hung now in the room. No one said anything for a while, as what she hadn’t said—didn’t need to say, since everyone in her generation already under stood—resonated for a few moments. Chris and I looked at each other, but were slower in grasping what it was she’d left out. And then it dawned on us too: her brother had been a suicide bomber and blown himself up in the car.
