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Working with one eye closed or heads buried under their drapes, they focus to preserve the drowned shell-hole, the salient's rubble of dead, the bleached bones of sepoys torn from the earth. Their stills haunt us: a stretcher piled with skulls at Cold Harbour, graves in a barren wood that in one hour's carnage lost its name to history and the world's memory of death. The worst has happened, they confirm the worst: but show us too the makeshift hospital, the sad errand of the hospital van among the ruins. Also enough of sky to suggest the infinity of angles, that behind sandbags, under the hostile towers someone is finding time for a wry note on bowel movements, an entry that affirms the loved salience of what is always there: flower of Auschwitz, bird of the Western Front.

The mountain sheep are sweeter, But the valley sheep are fatter; We therefore deemed it meeter To carry off the latter. We made an expedition; We met a host, and quelled it; We forced a strong position, And killed the men who held it. On Dyfed's richest valley, Where herds of kine were browsing, We made a mighty sally, To furnish our carousing. Fierce warriors rushed to meet us; We met them, and o'erthrew them: They struggled hard to beat us; But we conquered them, and slew them. As we drove our prize at leisure, The king marched forth to catch us: His rage surpassed all measure, But his people could not match us. He fled to his hall-pillars; And, ere our force we led off, Some sacked his house and cellars, While others cut his head off. We there, in strife bewild'ring, Spilt blood enough to swim in: We orphaned many children, And widowed many women. The eagles and the ravens We glutted with our foemen; The heroes and the cravens, The spearmen and the bowmen. We brought away from battle, And much their land bemoaned them, Two thousand head of cattle, And the head of him who owned them: Ednyfed, king of Dyfed, His head was borne before us; His wine and beasts supplied our feasts, And his overthrow, our chorus.

Try as much as I can try not to be I, nevertheless, I would mind that so much. . . said the oats to the water . . . which was working up to a boil . . . See, I said . . . to my daughter . . . Even oats . . . even oats maybe mind the boil . . . mind becoming oatmeal . . . For there was a small matter . . . Oleg had sent me a letter . . . I was to become . . . under Oleg’s orders . . . an angel . . . But we were late for school . . . We should be frantically . . . fossicking . . . but no, not if I was . . . dying . . . always late . . . I AM TO BECOME . . . I announced to her . . . before breakfast . . . AN ANGEL PRESENCE . . . I sugarcoated it . . . an angel who will bread your house . . . with lily dust . . . Why would I need lily dust . . . You’ll know when you’re an adult . . . Oleg . . . due any minute . . . I was telling her how I’d be . . . constantly . . . crossing over . . . to visit her . . . She asked . . . Will I know who you are? . . . Well not at first . . . No . . . But I am sure you will always be gracious . . . She was questioning things . . . very . . . worldlily . . . which sounds like she was making the world’s weight . . . into a delicate petal . . . of flower cellulose . . . but no . . . just . . . worldly is what she is . . . was . . . Once . . . when you were thirty-two . . . and in that attic apartment . . . and you . . . well . . . I understood . . . And you were cold . . . And I kissed your head . . . The top of it . . . In order to smell your hair . . . Mom don’t smell my head . . . I’m not even eight yet . . . Right . . . Yes . . . I must have been having a nucleolytic episode . . . in which I foresaw . . .Mom . . . I heard her . . . I was still there but already . . . in the . . . underbelly . . . ? I was thinking of a lovely girl I knew . . . Last name De Flamand . . . she once wrote a lovely piece . . . about the world daffodil. . . and the difference . . . between yellow and yellowy . . . Mom . . . How nice it was going to be . . . to fit in . . . the underneath . . . or overhead . . . what have you . . . happily! . . . It was all coming to a sharp point . . . Had to get back to the present . . . for a moment . . . See . . . I said to my daughter . . . See . . . Even oats mind becoming oatmeal . . . We were staring down into the saucepan . . . my daughter in my arms . . . we played Taps. . . on our lips . . . in honor of the oats . . . I was present for that peculiarly sad moment . . . and still am . . . afterward . . .

War the war, the sorry edge of us, because we stacked nice clean plates for days, we were sure things when love broke across the headland, leaving conch shells in ditches, five fish slapping on the steps of the old town hall, it was winter, we were bonfires unattended, our bodies litigating, agreeing and writing it all down, the law of legs, the law of how we sleep, the law of shoulders killing me, and now we fold clothes without thinking my clothes your clothes and war the war o happy war what love we are so badly bitten in this long-term necessary chapel with all attendant relics, citronella candle, junior hacksaw, a box of miscellaneous wires, our headland way-way underwater, no one else beside us but ourselves beside ourselves.

for Clara Fraser I do not understand why men make war. Is it because artillery is the most stoic example of what flesh can become? Is it because the military plan is the final map drawn by the wisest hunter? Is it because the neutron ray is the invincible finger no one will disobey? or Is it because the flood of blood is the proper penance workers must pay for failing tribute at the prescribed hour? I do not understand why men make war. Is it because when death is multiple and expanding, there among the odd assemblages, arbitrary and unnamed, there among the shrivelled mountains, distorted and hollow, there among the liquid farms and cities, cold and sallow, there among the splintered bones of children, women, men and cattle there and only there, the eerie head of power is being born? Is it because submission is the only gesture to be rehearsed, to be dressed, to be modeled, to be cast, to be chosen in the one and only one drama to be staged in the theater of this world, where everyone must act with the backbone humbled with the mascara of bondage, with the lipstick of slaves under the light of gentle assassination with applause piercing the ground forever? or Is it because war is the secret room of all things to be kept sealed and contained, to be conquered and renamed woman enclosed by an empire of walls, vaults, hinges and locks with the hot key that men and only men must possess for an eternal evening to visit and contemplate, to snap open a favorite window and gaze at the calibrated murder as lovers of beauty?

The telephone never rings. Still you pick it up, smile into the static, the breath of those you’ve loved; long dead. The leaf you pick from the fall rises and dips away with every ridge. Fingers stiff from time, you trace. Staring off into a distance limned by cataracts and other collected debris, you have forgotten none of the long-ago joy of an ice-cream truck and its summer song. Between the paving stones; between tea, a cup, and the sound of you pouring; between the time you woke that morning and the time when the letter came, a tired sorrow: like an old flagellant able only to tease with a weak sting. Riding the elevator all day, floor after floor after floor, each stop some small victory whittled from the hard stone of death, you smile. They used to write epics about moments like this.

When I left Eli Zabar the cut-out star on the window was whirling in the animation of the rich and hungry hunched over tables for a $30 sandwich and a Diet Coke. It was raining and the blurred glass of the galleries was the gold leaf of the Carrig Rhone frames— Childe Hassam’s dabs of Connecticut trees the diaphanous blue on the fleshy rocks, the melting opal of the shoals. Inside the Whitney the rain trailed down my face; and I found myself in a quiet corner staring at the pink face of Marilyn Monroe. I could still smell the smoldering high-tech plastic as it burned the air. In the whiteness of her teeth, in the almost aahh of her mouth and the half-drugged eyes under the lids of teal shadow, the air kept singeing my nose. Against the pale walls Marilyn’s face dissolved like a stretched mesh and litho ink where plain form is a place of no desire like the empty mirror of the Hudson at dawn. In the fissures of her make-up, the planes of color led back and back behind her teeth longing— to the deception by the Falls on her honeymoon (with Joseph Cotton in Niagara)—where we found her clothed and alarmed, and later desperate for the affirmation, of a President’s limp dick and the crisp sheets the same color of these walls—as my t shirt dries to my skin and the faintest scent of ground zero sifts down on the walls whiter than the wingtip vortices of melting in the morning light.

When I saw his face on a wall at a party in a parlor looking out at the Hudson, at a fundraiser for the winter soldiers over blocks of cheese and baguettes, I had just come from some grainy footage of Dien Bien Phu in a hot black room, where the scratched print showed the hills undulating, bodies and parachutes disappearing in jungle grass. Between decadence and the alien Mao was propped in yellow and rouge with lipstick and eye shadow, a real queen—part décor, part radical something the American lexicon hadn’t filled in yet. From the aerial cameras Haiphong Harbor was liquid light. In liquid light, I saw my draft card float like a giant litho over the highway at 79th the letters popped—selective service system— and morphed into gray rain— anyone could have done it— singed, blurred, laminated— and the bartender poured me another unidentified drink. In the scratched cellulose nitrite, parachutes kept drifting down on the hedges of the Laotian border. On the wall Mao was the punctum in rouge and yellow and smear. Didn’t every myth signify confusion? Confucius, Charlie Chan, Chiang Kai-shek? (An American vision of a place.) The guy behind me in class asked, “Where is this place?” Hanoi was glittering flecks on the nightly news, and the teacher answered, “Every snake of land is someone’s history.” We didn’t know what we didn’t know about the backyard furnaces, the tens of millions. Even if Mao swallowed Darwin and Adam Smith swimming the Yangtze—here on the Upper West in late spring, he was wallpaper, the most recognizable face in the world. There seemed no point in breaking through the mask— I was glued to the colors for a while, until the next war let us out of Asia until the sun went down on the wall.

It has never been so easy to cry openly or to acknowledge children. Never before could I walk directly to the center of an island city feeling the automatism of millions drawing one pious breath, shouldering the sunset, holding it up in the oily tree-line a while longer. Years ago, I was never sad enough and nothing but a hotel that I could tear to pieces and reconstruct inside a shoebox felt like home. My parents died. Their miserable possessions washed up in other hotels, dioramas of the febrile romantic. I take my first lover, already gray at her temples and more reticent than shy, more tacit than admiring, to the bus stop by the Jewish Museum. We wait in the dark a long time. She does not kiss me. She hurries up out of the oily street onto the humming, fluorescent podium of the last bus where I see her a last time, not waving to me, not lovable, erect in the freedom we traduced years ago in our first kiss. Never deny the power of withdrawal. Never doubt that thought and time make things small. Never refuse the easy exit line or prescribed uncomprehending gesture. At childhood’s end, none can tell happiness from buoyancy. None of it made any difference— the patricides, the hotels ill-constructed, the inconstant starlight of drugs and rebellion. We are no more complicated than our great-grandparents who dreaded the hotel life. Like them, we seek the refuge of warm days in January, a piety whose compulsion is to survive according to explicit laws no young woman adores or young man follows with darling hunger.

for Bill Berkson & Khaled al-Assad the union president’s dead & they won’t let transgender people pee in north carolina & here i’m complaining about climbing the mountain again the mountain’ll always remain if i’m lucky, to keep me from sucking & only a king mule will do. humbled by bill as he goes through the business of staying alive with dignified unconcern. i don’t deserve him, have no zen no dasein, just half-a-dozen self -inflicted wounds i’m expected to grin & bear & like robert plant, i do. it’s like i’m in a rembrandt or something holding testtubes to the sun to read my urine specimens & —spoiler alert—i’m trigger sad checked my email mid-poem so of course its bad news the ancient city is practically gone, palmyra, palmyra at least i still have bill here in isis usa