502 War poems

O tan-faced prairie-boy, Before you came to camp came many a welcome gift, Praises and presents came and nourishing food, till at last among the recruits, You came, taciturn, with nothing to give – we but look’d on each other, When lo! more than all the gifts of the world you gave me.

She came into my view as vivid as Somebody on a screen in a movie seen, Elegant in the focus of my eye. Birdboned. Quick and light. Not wearing pajamas. The little run resembling playfulness. Calling out something, screaming something or other As if her little mouth was fervently singing, As if you couldn’t hear what the words could be, Because of the singing. I had her in my sight. Other people were there, wearing pajamas, Streaming out of some hideyhole or other Into the way that that was how I saw them. The trees of the kind that grew there establish the place. We know that way the story of what it was.

Moving forward or back? Which way am I? I wake grasping your nightgown. I am still there. In the haze of faces burning. Arch of spreading flame, black-haired girl in saddle shoes and plaid skirt, knee-deep in a yard of violets. Her father, in clogs, pounding a path home, balancing buckets of carp on a bamboo pole. Daughter, father, splash of carp, magenta rows, white light's flashbulb zing fades as I cling to silk's edge, slats of ribs a bridge I take to your belly's bulge. My pollen inside you, nubs of arms and legs, hands with fingers petaling. Vase of roses on the night stand. Your gold ring engraved with my initials. The father, feet from the gate, his daughter kneeling with shears, pruning flowerbeds. Sealed in sheets, I draw close to your body, place my ear against flesh, listen to the rhythmic thumping inside water.

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. I took a chair outside and watched the sun. In the sixth month of a disastrous reign in the house of money in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money, our great country of money, we (forgive us) lived happily during the war.

[Grand Forks, North Dakota] A boy just like you took me out to see them, the five hundred B-52’s on alert on the runway, fully loaded fully manned pointed in all the directions, running every minute of every day. They sound like a sickness of the inner ear, where the heard foams up into the noise of listening, where the listening arrives without being extinguished. The huge hum soaks up into the dusk. The minutes spring open. Six is too many. From where we watch, from where even watching is an anachronism, from the 23rd of March from an open meadow, the concertina wire in its double helix designed to tighten round a body if it turns is the last path the sun can find to take out, each barb flaring gold like a braille being read, then off with its knowledge and the sun is gone.... That’s when the lights on all the extremities, like an outline, like a dress, become loud in the story, and a dark I have not seen before sinks in to hold them one by one. Strange plot made to hold so many inexhaustible screams. Have you ever heard in a crowd mutterings of blame that will not modulate that will not rise? He tells me, your stand-in, they stair-step up. He touches me to have me look more deeply in to where for just a moment longer color still lives: the belly white so that it looks like sky, the top some kind of brown, some soil—How does it look from up there now this meadow we lie on our bellies in, this field Iconography tells me stands for sadness because the wind can move through it uninterrupted? What is it the wind would have wanted to find and didn’t leafing down through this endless admiration unbroken because we’re too low for it to find us? Are you still there for me now in that dark we stood in for hours letting it sweep as far as it could down over us unwilling to move, irreconcilable? What he wants to tell me, his whisper more like a scream over this eternity of engines never not running, is everything: how the crews assigned to each plane for a week at a time, the seven boys, must live inseparable, how they stay together for life, how the wings are given a life of seven feet of play, how they drop practice bombs called shapes over Nevada, how the measures for counterattack in air have changed and we now forego firepower for jamming, for the throwing of false signals. The meadow, the meadow hums, love, with the planes, as if every last blade of grass were wholly possessed by this practice, wholly prepared. The last time I saw you, we stood facing each other as dusk came on. I leaned against the refrigerator, you leaned against the door. The picture window behind you was slowly extinguished, the tree went out, the two birdfeeders, the metal braces on them. The light itself took a long time, bits in puddles stuck like the useless splinters of memory, the chips of history, hopes, laws handed down.Here, hold these he says, these grasses these torn pods, he says, smiling over the noise another noise,take these he says, my hands wrong for the purpose, here, not-visible-from-the-sky, prepare yourself with these, boy and bouquet of thistleweed and wort and william and timothy. We stood there. Your face went out a long time before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said.Nor I, you, whatever you still were replied. When I asked you to hold me you refused. When I asked you to cross the six feet of room to hold me you refused. Until I couldn’t rise out of the patience either any longer to make us take possession. Until we were what we must have wanted to be: shapes the shapelessness was taking back. Why should I lean out? Why should I move? When the Maenads tear Orpheus limb from limb, they throw his head out into the river. Unbodied it sings all the way downstream, all the way to the single ocean, head floating in current downriver singing, until the sound of the cataracts grows, until the sound of the open ocean grows and the voice.

I was a minuteman at Concord Bridge, I was a frigate-gunner on Lake Erie, I was a mortarman at Stony Ridge, I fought at San Juan Hill and Château Thierry, I braved Corregidor and the Arctic Sea: The index finger brings democracy. These States bred freedom in and in my bone— Old as the new testament of Plymouth Bay. When the Founding Fathers laid the Cornerstone And rued the thirteen clocks that would not say The hour on the hour, I nerved myself with them Under the noose in the hand of the tyrant’s whim. I’ve seen the alien ships of destiny Plow the sea mountains between the hemispheres. I’ve seen the Gulf Stream of our history Littered with derelicts of corsair careers. I’ve heard the watchman cry, “The bars! The bars!” When midnight held the funeral of stars. I saw horizontal States grow vertical, From Plymouth Harbor to the Golden Gate, Till wedged against skyscapes empyreal Their glories elbowed the decrees of fate. These States bred freedom in and in my bone: I hymn their virtues and their sins atone. The tares and wheat grow in the self-same field, The rose and thorn companion on the bush, The gold and gravel cuddle in the yield, The oil and grit and dirt together gush. The Gordian knot to be or not to be Snares not the free. My faith props the tomorrows, for I know The roots of liberty, tough-fibered, feed On the blood of tyrants and martyrs; the judas blow Tortures the branches till they twist and bleed; And yet no Caesar, vitamined on loot, Can liberty uproot! I am the Unknown Soldier: I open doors To the Rights of Man, letters incarnadine. These shrines of freedom are mine as well as yours; These ashes of freemen yours as well as mine. My troubled ghost shall haunt These States, nor cease Till the global war becomes a global peace.

The missile to launch a missile was almost a secret. Two male Ph.D.’s were picked and primed to fill it and one hundred carefully counted insects, three almost new snakes, coiled in a cube, exactly fifty fish creatures in tanks, the necessary files, twenty bars of food, ten brief cures, special locks, fourteen white rats, fourteen black rats, a pouch of dirt, were all stuffed aboard before the thing blasted from the desert. And the missile that launched a missile launched out into a marvelous scientific balloon that rolled and bobbed about in the mists of Venus; suddenly sank like a sweet fat grape, oozing past gravity to snuggle down upon the triumphant shape of space. The two men signaled Earth, telling their Continent V ENUS IS G REEN . And parades assembled, the loud earth tellers spent all fifteen minutes on it, even shortened their weather forecast. But rival nations, angry and oily, fired up their best atom blast and the last Earth war was done. The place became crater on each side, sank down to its first skull, shedding forests, oceans, dried bones and neons, as it fell through time like a forgotten pitted stone. These two men walked hopefully out onto their hot empty planet with machines, rats, tanks, boxes, insects and the one odd set of three almost new snakes, to make the tests they were meant to do. But on the seventh month the cages grew small, too small to interview, too tight to bear. The rats were gray and heavy things where they ran against wire and the snakes built eggs on eggs and even the fish began to bump in water as they spawned on every side of each other’s swim. And the men grew listless; they opened the pouch of dirt, undid each locked bin and let every creature loose to live on Venus, or anyhow hide under rocks. Bees swarmed the air, letting a warm pollen slide from their wings and onto the grass. The fish flapped to a small pool and the rats untangled their hairs and humped over the vestibule of the cramped balloon. Trees sprang from lichen, the rock became a park, where, even at star-time, things brushed; even in the planet’s new dark crotch, that air snag where snakes coupled and rats rubbed in disrepair, it grew quick and noisy with a kind of wonder in the lonely air. Old and withered, two Ph.D.’s from Earth hobbled slowly back to their empty balloon, crying alone for sense, for the troubling lack of something they ought to do, while countless fish slapped and the waters grew, green came taller and the happy rats sped through integrated forests, barking like dogs at the top of the sky. But the two men, that last morning of death, before the first of light, watched the land of Venus, its sweetless shore, and thought, “This is the end. This is the last of a man like me.” Until they saw, over the mists of Venus, two fish creatures stop on spangled legs and crawl from the belly of the sea. And from the planet park they heard the new fruit drop.

Someone has opened a giant map and with the tips of our fingers, each of us suddenly blind, we track the black cold of this monument for names we know like finding a route home. Lost here this damp spring morning, the cherries exploding like the fourth of July, we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam sold those years, so many strange sounding places. One of us holds a magnifying glass to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb, small print in the polished stone, the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois might have done, late at night searching that faraway land on his kitchen table, hearing again the morning paper thump against the front door, that boy on his bike in the dark grown and gone—what was his name, that kid from down the block?— Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi. --for PFC William "Willie" Searle

Poets' Anti-War Rally, 12 Feb. 2003 The massed and pillared wings of the White House never fly— whitewashed yearly, they stand impervious to metaphor, to hawk and dove, and red armies of ants. Only the halting squirrels investigate, creeping past the arrowhead gates to scratch the Midas lawns for treasure—On the street, commentators wander like boys in a story too simple to explain. The political message, a hat punched inside out: once, the Nazis got word that Churchill would visit Roosevelt "in Casa Blanca": U-Boats bobbed near the Potomac, waiting for him... but Churchill, as he said, was sailing to Morocco. Reagan protesters splashed the Pentagon walls daily with cow blood— soldiers waxed the plaster, and triremes of rats licked the bloody grass; the EPA sent health goons to stomp them, and the pacifists, away— Then rats stormed the National Zoo: urbane, patient inheritors of the earth, they snapped prairie dogs like wishbones; vigilante zookeepers laced the ground with poison, Carthage delenda est, and killed the hippo. (Here, in the New World Order, penguin and polar bear soak up ozone, and Nation shall beat them both into ploughshares....) Hawks and fat cats disdained the White House squirrels, their proconsul Chevy Suburban nosed us aside: we spoke against the war, and for the cameras, spelled our names on Chinese Radio—Elder poets shrewdly loitered at the lobbiest bar, read first, then left us to the falange of Secret Servicemen, chatting like critics into their black lapels at every bungled line: this was no singing school, no falcon heard our crows and warbles... Emily, our modest leader, rapped the gate: "Mrs. Bush wanted American poems— I brought 3,000, all against the war. Can you take them?" Gulping, the pimply guard asked his shirt for help; older hands hustled up, "The Great Oz cannot see you..." etc. Will four and twenty blackbirds fill a cowboy hat? Bunkered belowdecks, the President goes for the burn, racing the cut tongue of his treadmill to a dead heat. Even Nixon met the enemy once, strode with his staff into a red sea of hippies— they didn't part, and he burbled about baseball... from his desk, he liked to watch the sightseers through a gap in the hedges; peaceniks learned this and blocked his view, stood there day and night for years: Nixon, nightmare reality shanking through his eyes, knelt with Kissinger: Henry, he moaned,what do they want?.... Days from now, how many days, the Valentine "Woo at the Zoo" begins. A hand-raised falcon bows, and shares meat with its master.... He bows in turn, and eats; both softly whisper ee-chu, ee-chu,

We thought nothing of it, he says, though some came so close to where we slept. I try to see him as a boy, back in the Philippines, waking to the sound of machine guns. His family would spend their morning spreading a paste over the sores of the house’s thick walls. He tells how he touched points where bullets entered, his fingers, he says, disappeared into the holes, as if inside there existed a space where everything from this world could vanish. Here we could place the memory of my sister, his daughter, who died after a car wreck. Wedge her into the smoky path & cover her in sunlight. The family next door is raking leaves in the yard. A father scolds his children for jumping into large piles he arranged into a crescent moon. We cannot hear them from inside, but I feel they are frightened as he grabs both of them around the waist & spins. I wait for the ending to my father’s story, but he is too busy smiling, as if enjoying the silence of bullets frozen there in his mind.