The Prize

A book with poems about Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth, William Tell, W.B. Yeats, Ted Hughes, Sitting Bull, an otter, a fox, and a hare won the Pulitzer Prize in the first year of the war. In the second year, the year of insurgency, of bridges, corpses, blindfolds, and dogs, a poet who wrote about the only species that commits suicide received the prize. In the year of boycotts and stained fingertips, the third of the war, the prize went to a retired life insurance executive who lived on acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska. Disappearance, from one life to another, was the subject of the prizewinner in the year of growing sectarian violence, the fourth of the war, also the year of verdict and hanging. In the fifth year, of surge and black water, the civil war continued, and the prize was given to a book about our civil war, which ended 143 years earlier. In the sixth year, the prize was granted to a poet who wrote a lovely poem about war, the war in Europe, where white men killed each other by the millions; his poem still mentioned an Arab, a young man who performs an act of purification, removing hair from his body, before flying a plane into an office building, an act that took place fifty-eight years after the war the poem is actually about. The prize was shared in the sixth year of the war, the other book evoking pleasures (of family, beaches, and dogs) and horrors (of young men purifying their bodies with speed and conviction). In the seventh year, the year of ceasefire and effigy, the prize was presented to a book about loss, memory, and the continuum of time; the book was named after a dog in the sky. The war went on, for eight years now, and many soldiers (300,000) were returned home, and many others (not soldiers, too many to count) were returned to the earth; this was the year of exit strategies, and a book described as filled with “little thought-bombs” won the Pulitzer Prize. In the year of renaming, the ninth, a new dawn replaced freedom, and the prizewinner had served as United States Poet Laureate in the war’s sixth, seventh, and eighth years. The last year, the year of withdrawal, the prize was given to a book named after life on another planet, which is a yearning for another way to live, which is also another way to die. Long after life on Earth the depleted uranium in the Tigris will reach its half-life, four and a half billion years after the tenth year of the war, which is the end of time.