by David Lehman
Interior. The sky darkened by the terror of the birds.
In the dream time, they are still rising, swarming,
Darkening the sky, the chorus of their cries sharpening
As the echo of that first astounding explosion shimmers
On the waters, the crew blinking at the wind of their wings.
Springfield Arsenal, 1777. Rock Island Arsenal, 1862.
The original Henry rifle: a sixteen shot .44 caliber rimfire
Lever-action, breech-loading rifle patented—it was an age
Of tinkerers—by one Benjamin Tyler Henry in 1860,
Just in time for the Civil War. Confederate casualties
In battle: about 95,000. Union casualties in battle:
About 110,000. Contain, explode. They were throwing
Sand into the fire, a blue flare, an incandescent green.
The Maxim machine gun, 1914, 400–600 small caliber rounds
Per minute. The deaths in combat, all sides, 1914–1918
Was 8,042,189. Someone was counting. Must have been.
They could send things whistling into the air by boiling water.
The children around the fire must have shrieked with delight
1920: Iraq, the peoples of that place were “restive,”
Under British rule and Winston Churchill
Invented the new policy of “aerial policing” which amounted,
Sources say, to bombing civilians and then pacifying them
With ground troops. Which led to the tactic of terrorizing civilian
Populations in World War II. Total casualties in that war,
Worldwide: soldiers, 21 million; civilians, 27 million.
They were throwing sand into the fire. The ancestor who stole
Lightning from the sky had his guts eaten by an eagle.
Spreadeagled on a rock, the great bird feasting.
They are wondering if he is a terrorist or mentally ill.
London, Dresden. Berlin. Hiroshima, Nagasaki.
The casualties difficult to estimate. Hiroshima:
66,000 dead, 70,000 injured. In a minute. Nagasaki:
39,000 dead; 25,000. There were more people killed,
100,000, in more terrifying fashion in the firebombing
Of Tokyo. Two arms races after the ashes settled.
The other industrial countries couldn’t get there
Fast enough. Contain, burn. One scramble was
For the rocket that delivers the explosion that burns humans
By the tens of thousands and poisons the earth in the process.
They were wondering if the terrorist was crazy. If he was
A terrorist, maybe he was just unhappy. The other
Challenge afterwards was how to construct machine guns
A man or a boy could carry: lightweight, compact, easy to assemble.
First a Russian sergeant, a Kalashnikov, clever with guns
Built one on a German model. Now the heavy machine gun,
The weapon of European imperialism through which
A few men trained in gunnery could slaughter native armies
In Africa and India and the mountains of Afghanistan,
Became “a portable weapon a child can operate.”
The equalizer. So the undergunned Vietnamese insurgents
Fought off the greatest army in the world, so the Afghans
Fought off the Soviet army using Kalashnikovs the CIA
Provided to them. They were throwing powders in the fire
And dancing. Children’s armies in Africa toting AK-47s
That fire thirty rounds a minute. A round is a bullet.
An estimated 500 million firearms on the earth.
100 million of them are Kalashnikov-style semiautomatics.
They were dancing in Orlando, in a club. Spring night.
Gay Pride. The relation of the total casualties to the history
Of the weapon that sent exploded metal into their bodies—
30 rounds a minute, or 40, is a beautifully made instrument,
And in America you can buy it anywhere—and into the history
Of the shaming culture that produced the idea of Gay Pride—
They were mostly young men, they were dancing in a club,
A spring night. The radio clicks on. Green fire. Blue fire.
The immense flocks of terrified birds still rising
In wave after wave above the waters in the dream time.
Crying out sharply. As the French ship breasted the vast interior
Of the new land. America. A radio clicks on. The Arabs,
A commentator is saying, require a heavy hand. Dancing.
from The American Poetry Review
TERRANCE HAYES
* * *
American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin
For her last birthday I found in a used New Jersey
Toy store, a six inch Amiri Baraka action figure
With three different outfits: an elaborately colored
Dashiki with afro pick; a black linen Leninist getup,
And a sports coat with elbow patches & wool Kangol.
Accessories include an ink pen & his father’s pistol.
If you dip him in bathwater, he will leak
The names of his abandoned children. Pull a string,
He sings “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note”
Sweeter than the sweetest alto to ever sing
In the Boys Choir of Harlem. The store clerk tried
Selling me the actual twenty volume note LeRoi Jones
Wrote the night before Baraka put a bullet in him.
I would’ve bought it. But I had no room in my suitcase.
from Harvard Review
JUAN FELIPE HERRERA
* * *
Roll Under the Waves
we roll under the waves
not above them we bodysurf and somehow we lose
the momentum there are memories trailing us empty orange
and hot pink bottles of medicines left behind
buried next to a saguaro there are baby backpacks
and a thousand shoes and a thousand gone steps
leading in the four directions each one without destinations
there are men lying facedown forever and women
dragging under the fences and children still running with
torn faces all the way to Tucson leathery and peeling
there are vigilantes with skull dust on their palms
and the trigger and the sputum and the moon with
its pocked hope and its blessings and its rotations into the spikes
there is a road forgotten with a tiny sweet roof of twigs
and a black griddle threaded with songs like the one
about el contrabando from El Paso there is nothing
a stolen land forgotten too a stolen life branded and
tied and thrown into the tin patrol box with flashes of trees
and knife-shaped rivers and the face of my mother Luz and
water running next to the animals still thrashing choking
their low burnt violin muffled screams in rings
of roses across the mountains
from Love’s Executive Order
EDWARD HIRSCH
* * *
Stranger by Night
After I lost
my peripheral vision
I started getting sideswiped
by pedestrians cutting
in front of me
almost randomly
like memories
I couldn’t see coming
as I left the building
at twilight
or stepped gingerly
off the curb
or even just crossed
the wet pavement
to the stairs descending
precipitously
into the subway station
and I apologized
to every one
&nb
sp; of those strangers
jostling me
in a world that had grown
stranger by night.
from The Threepenny Review
JANE HIRSHFIELD
* * *
Ledger
Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is 3,592 measures.
A voice kept far from feeling is heard as measured.
What’s wanted in desperate times are desperate measures.
Pushkin’s unfinished Onegin: 5,446 lines.
No visible tears measure the pilot’s grief
as she Lidars the height of an island: five feet.
Fifty, its highest leaf.
She logs the years, the weathers, the tree has left.
A million fired-clay bones—animal, human—
set down in a field as protest
measure 400 yards long, 60 yards wide, weigh 112 tons.
The length and weight and silence of the bereft.
Bees do not question the sweetness of what sways beneath them.
One measure of distance is meters. Another is li.
Ten thousand li can be translated: “far.”
For the exiled, home can be translated “then,” translated “scar.”
One liter
of Polish vodka holds twelve pounds of potatoes.
What we care about most, we call beyond measure.
What matters most, we say counts. Height now is treasure.
On this scale of one to ten, where is eleven?
Ask all you wish, no twenty-fifth hour will be given.
Measuring mounts—like some Western bar’s mounted elk head—
our catalogued vanishing unfinished heaven.
from Times Literary Supplement
JAMES HOCH
* * *
Sunflowers
Standing in front of Van Gogh’s portrait,
the winter one with the bandage and heavy
green overcoat, blue hat with black fur,
every stroke pained as the mangled face
he is showing us, mangled but repairing
as if he’s lived through something worth
pleading, shellacked and deft on canvas—
my son asks What happened to his head?
He’s still a kid and doesn’t know the story,
the unbearability of loving the ones who leave.
When I don’t answer he eats the quiet,
the way when I turn down the radio’s litany
of casualties, he hunkers like a monk
burying his head in a bowl of Cheerios.
But really, what is there to say about that—
A photo of my brother patrolling a field
of sunflowers in Afghanistan. It’ll be years
before he understands the ear, that presence
implicates the missing. It’ll be just after
school lets out, driving to the grocery store,
and he will tell me about another Van Gogh,
a vase of sunflowers, they studied in art class.
Simple task: To record in journals how each
differs, this head from that, this paint from that.
We will be crossing the creek bridge
and he will be mid-sentence and I will be
thinking summer—Roadsides lined with flowers
in black buckets, and birds taking seed
out of ones we plant along the garden fence,
wondering if he knows about Gauguin,
the Yellow House in Arles. And just when
I feel I am almost useful, he will ask:
Did your brother have to kill anyone?
What I don’t know becomes signature.
What I can’t say becomes silence
and silence scores the mind, and the mind,
never letting go, takes the marks and makes
a house of the cuttings. But all that’s outside
the frame. We are here now, looking
backward and forward at a painting of a man
injured by love. And if I had the means,
I’d ditch the day, turn all elsewheres noise,
and hold truant the coma calm of a museum.
And if I had the heart not to feel this forever
is not the one my son wants, I’d break it,
strew it against the bric-a-brac and static.
To stay still this long is a terrible thing to ask.
from The American Poetry Review
BOB HOLMAN
* * *
All Praise Cecil Taylor
Rhythm is the Life of Space of Time danced through.
—Cecil Taylor
Them laugh them cry them fingers flip wise
Troll the riverbed dead not dead not dead
Once after the concert you told me it was not after the concert
This is the concert is just what you said
I remember that now along with dead not dead not dead
So a blew note blows trill still the hurricane of silence
You mentioned how the string got unstrung and when it rung
That’s where it begun so begin again a little closer to the end
Where the bend won’t bend and the bang hangs a blend
Right at the point and left with the joint just hammer
Hammer the pale night nail (hammer the pale night nail)
The jawdropper corral where the pedal dance flail
That’s the cozy up to it reborn, where the Stop sign is a square
Baby understands, rocks the baby grand and rolls the key
Till the lock screams “I Give” and all the dough
Comes rolling up to Heaven’s creak, squeak squeak
from Black Renaissance Noire
GARRETT HONGO
* * *
The Bathers, Cassis
It’s too hot to think much about the ochre cliffs of Cap Canaille
or the moan of a tour boat’s engines grinding through the aquamarine
of the Mediterranean.
I’m inside measuring the width of the white ribbon of the wake
like a long skin shedding itself from the exoskeleton of a Zodiac boat,
assessing valuations of finitude amongst my household property,
gazing at the bathers as they take turns diving off the limestone promontory
below and to my left,
lazily frog-kicking through the cerulean waters of Port-de-Cassis.
Their bodies are pale as salamanders as they scoot through
the zaffre and viridian
back to the rock-toothed shore where they pull themselves up,
amphibian-like, stunning the air with their glistening bodies.
It is a sensate joy that releases like ecstatic vapor
from off their skins and sea-drenched hair.
A hand has touched them and pass’d over their bodies,
but not over mine.
If I were to walk a serrated shore, worn by wind and the idylls
of companionship,
I’d be twenty again and arrogant as Icarus
making survey of his father’s domain,
scanning the surface of the sea for a boil of sardines
glinting like a scatter of coins.
Preposterously, I’d glance neither to my left or to my right,
and launch myself straight into a dive of my own,
unshowy and silent as I cut the immaculate waters,
joyous only in the theater of my own being, alone
as the brown salts that dry on the stoic, limestone lips of the sea,
unconsecrated by touch, the liquidinous mask of my face
submerged and upturned, trailing shrouds of sapphire and indigo.
from The Kenyon Review
ISHION HUTCHINSON
* * *
Sympathy of a Clear Day
By melon carts and feral cats skinning off adobe
walls, we thread the white heat of day on the square,
to the café minarets
level at our eyes, vapor coils
of virgin snow peaks through them, ready to spring.
Travel is sympathy. Not so, you point at what’s below:
birds and monkeys shuck to perform by their cages;
snakes rise in fragrant droppings on carpets children
squat with whisks while tourist dollars and coins fill baskets.
Souks edge the lubric traffic. Commerce, from the good
cool of this café, prowls and gnaws the city to the bone.
Mighty caravans appear still with oaths and murmurs
from across the equator, no longer with tents, for cheap
hotels proliferate as madly as the war raged for oil.
From this height we are in a spell of fabrics, lavender
and saffron, those loggias of black soften in the haze
glow basalt and move in fluid swaths against shadows.
Bless Churchill’s cruel, romantic eyes, in one regard,
for painting the sky’s fragile lilac and radio wafer,
no longer audible, over the bazaar’s broken watercolours.
His self-centered ego now turns unseen, incessant drones.
“To celebrate,” you tell me with mock triumph, “a holiday
is to become free for the unaccustomed day: the clear day.”
The clear day I repeat, then shudder remembering another
phrase, the God-land compressed within itself, and remind you.
Any reprieve but none from the unredeemable world.
Weighted voices. Clouds cover the propane tank on the terrace;
we come down to go to the desert, that final archive where
dragnet of stars blanch at sunset over travelers in slow progress.
from Freeman’s
DIDI JACKSON
* * *
The Burning Bush
for Brianne Ortt (1979–2016)
