Fred Marchant

I have seen the legislators on their way, the jacketless men in mid-winter who will cast their votes like stones for this war. Men who have to cross the street through slush and over gutter, their cuffs now vaguely blued with a salt that dries in dots where it splashes, and mingles with the finely woven cloth of the chalk-stripe suits, the soi-disant practical men, you can see them now tiptoeing, now leaping, balletic, windsor-knotted, fragrant and shaved, they pass, they pass the window of the Capitol Deli wherein I am writing to my friend in Baghdad, he a “witness for peace,” a poet who for years has wondered what good poetry is or has been or does. I compose today’s answer from here, saying, I think of poetry as a salt dug from a foreign mine

“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming, linoleum flecked with flame, a thick coat of wax that flashed down a corridor and led to a room, a place where I curled up a few innocuous inches off the floor. Straps—word out of strophe, the restraints of line and stanza— straps hung in loops on closet hooks. On the nightstand a basket with peanut butter crackers, a vivid and unnatural orange, a crinkly wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked with icy juices, foil boxes, straws glued on. A female voice next door claimed she was still a human being, though I could not hear the reasons. When it was my turn, I answered right away, saying I knew where I was and why. No, I would not harm myself, surprised to be asked as I had never had the thought. Yes I knew where I was going next. Out the window and through shadow and streetlight, I saw how this building connected to the next. I was to follow a stripe painted on the wall. Someone would walk with me as well. I felt fine I said, and it was sort of true. Actually I felt nailed by one wrist to a desire to flee and by the other to a sincere longing for sleep. I was not in pain. Thank you. I felt like the very last note in a concert, the one that hovers as if it wants to linger, but is already over.”

I woke to more rain, and felt in the dark for how wet the sill was, then rolled back to my radio, and a midnight preacher in my earphone teaching about sin. I learned that punishment would come like lightning that surprises an innocent shore. Thunder would follow me all my days, stern reminder and sharp rebuke. The long, sleek, and pointed call that rose, as if in response, out of the estuary of night and storm, said it knew well what the given world gave, and wanted more.

That whine is the sound of waste, rot, the frantic, grinding inability to attend to anything but sere thwarting of yourself, a dry corrosion which some say they know, but you and I— (my jaw clenched as you turn a page, you with a heart like drywall, I who would lace my arms with razors, then press them slowly to your lips, the metal taste mixing with flesh, and through gritted teeth I making the sound of you, you, you do not know, meaning only me, me) we know best.

What god was it that would open earth’s picture book and see the two of us on a road, snowfields glittering on every side and poplars bent like the fingers of an old man clutching what he loved about the sun? Which one was it that would peer into our thatched, white-washed farmhouse, and see the fur, flies, and shit-stained walls? Which one laughed at the barbed wire fences, the wall topped with broken glass? Which of the many who came then, gleaming and rimed in hard sunlight? Which of those who bobbed like ice along the winter shore? What did we have that any god would want? Quick, if you can find it, hide it.