502 War poems

Night, the fat serpent, slipped among the plants, Intent upon the apples of his eyes; A heavy bandoleer hung like a prize Around his neck, and tropical red ants Mounted his body, and he heard advance, Little by little, the thin female cries Of mortar shells. He thought of Paradise. Such is the vision that extremity grants. In the clean brightness of magnesium Flares, there were seven angels by a tree. Their hair flashed diamonds, and they made him doubt They were not really from Elysium. And his flesh opened like a peony, Red at the heart, white petals furling out.

The coastline edges to the edge of our chart. We move on a central, generous blue. Wind high, ocean plain smack tonnage our bow plows through, the boiling salt excitement of our wake, gone in minutes, then birds on our bobbing crates a thousand miles from land. To pass the time I try to teach our bosun mate "Sailing to Byzantium." Good-natured, he laughs and laughs. It is by no   means enough that an officer    o f   the Navy should be a capable mariner.   H e   must  be that,  of  course, but  also  a  grea t deal more.  He  should   be  the  soul  of  tac t,   patience,   justice,   firmness  and   charity .  No  meritorious  act  of  a  subordinate  sho uld  escape  without  its  reward,  even  if  the reward  is  only  a  word  of  approval. Conver sely, he  should  not  be  blind   to  a  single  f ault in  any  subordinate  though,  at  the sam e time,  he  should  be  quick  and unfailing  t o  distinguish  error   from  malice, thoughtle ssness from  incompetency, and well meant s hortcoming from heedless  or stupid blunder.

I stare down into waterburn. This urge to enter what we see. Unrefracted tropical sun with its whole arm works deeply the ocean interior. Water and light in union make a third thing—color as fluid deepened endlessly. Into the quarry of aquamarine, high-walled with light, the mind high dives. My fingers cleave watersilk. I breathe heavy light. The big cavitation of the props gone by, my struggling stops, my slowed descent, in diminishing light, gains the country where the shark is eagle, fish the fishermen, and men no more than stones along the road.

try again. so the lesson goes. less a foot. an arm. an eye. easier to lose one of two, to split a pair, to untwine. other injuries are more difficult. a broken septum, an amputated tongue. consider the spleen. once ruptured the body is maligned, capillaries flooded with something other than. the greeks considered the spleen the organ of compassion, but the french recognized melancholy, the mottled flesh, the ache of. it is not, after all, the heart but the spleen that is the source of our greatest suffering. the heart is that which we cannot live without. it must be whole, intact. if our heart breaks, truly breaks, it must be replaced. but the spleen, that abalone nestled behind, within, can be carved down to a sliver of itself. it can live on somehow, a mere fragment of. • every day dawn finds herself naked and wonders if she has not in fact lost herself entirely in the night, her clothes, precepts, selfhood. what comes of a preposition, of love, some penetrated interiority. in this new and sudden opening, there is the fragile pink of sky, the lip of wind. dawn is not alone in her discomfort. the sun too is heavy with the previous day’s misfortunes. neither can bear the tentative movement of the other. she would withdraw safely into the darkness but sun is thick limbed, blocking the door. dawn walks backward toward the window, her legs shimmering with light. she will fall — she always does — upward, into the buoyancy of it. there will be witnesses. it does not matter who. for dawn there is only the swarm of light, the heady rush of it. everything else is incidental. • there is a story we tell. a story about suffering. not because we are only suffering, but because that is the story we have been taught to tell. take a beetle for instance. it talks of nothing other than the leaf it chews. the angularity of it. the soft brush underneath. there are many beetles. far more than there are humans. somehow our voices always drown them out. take crows for instance. they have been known to fish. not with their beaks but with fiberglass poles left idle by drunken fishermen. or maybe they are just sleeping. either way the crow speaks only of fish. the cold flesh. the fragile meat. in the story i tell myself there are often buffalo. not because they are prolific, but because they occupy the expanse of my memory, its continent. the buffalo are only a metaphor. snow is also a metaphor. bodies blanketed in white. freezing. we are all rigid with it. the story. tell something different. something about the rain. the sound of it. like walking skyward. away from one’s origins. what has been culled from one atmosphere falling gently into another. • energy is an attribute of objects. we often mistake the boulder for something other than. he is drawn to the laboratory dome, a concrete formation sitting cross-legged on the mountainside. as if protesting movement. as if unmovable. he finds breathing difficult, the opening and closing. he avoids people who demand such things. there are those who objected to nuclear fission, to anything being split in two. inside the concrete building, he finds the guts of the machine, metal tentacles wrapping around the bulbous head of an octopus. he stations himself at the tentacle’s tip and measures the distance electrons travel when driven from their source. a hundred years ago scientists believed that fission could split the world into sequences of light. they were right. he scatters particles, drives elements far from their nucleus. to create such structural injury. we continue to.

He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon, dark chocolates shaped like tanks and fighter jets, milk chocolate tomahawks, a bonbon like a kirsch grenade, mint chocolate bayonets. He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine descending in a chocolate sea, a drone unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline. He brings me cocoa powder, like chocolate blown to bits. Or chocolate squares of pepper heat. Or if perhaps we've fought, he brings a box of truffles home, missiles of semisweet dissolving on the tongue. He brings me Glocks and chocolate mines, a tiny transport plane, a bomb that looks delicious in its cellophane.

Operation Phantom Fury. *       *       * The full force of the will to live is fixed on the next occasion: someone coming with a tray, someone calling a number. *       *       * Each material fact is a pose, an answer waiting to be chosen. "Just so," it says. "Ask again!"

In the years to come they will say, “They fell like the leaves In the autumn of nineteen thirty-nine.” November has come to the forest, To the meadows where we picked the cyclamen. The year fades with the white frost On the brown sedge in the hazy meadows, Where the deer tracks were black in the morning. Ice forms in the shadows; Disheveled maples hang over the water; Deep gold sunlight glistens on the shrunken stream. Somnolent trout move through pillars of brown and gold. The yellow maple leaves eddy above them, The glittering leaves of the cottonwood, The olive, velvety alder leaves, The scarlet dogwood leaves, Most poignant of all. In the afternoon thin blades of cloud Move over the mountains; The storm clouds follow them; Fine rain falls without wind. The forest is filled with wet resonant silence. When the rain pauses the clouds Cling to the cliffs and the waterfalls. In the evening the wind changes; Snow falls in the sunset. We stand in the snowy twilight And watch the moon rise in a breach of cloud. Between the black pines lie narrow bands of moonlight, Glimmering with floating snow. An owl cries in the sifting darkness. The moon has a sheen like a glacier.

Far away, far away, men making wars. Other folk's blood spilt on other folk's floors. Only this morning I wounded my finger: a thorn on my rosebush pierced like a stinger. Sucking that finger, I thought of the war. Sad is the earth! And those people, so poor! I'm of no help, being here and not there, nor can I reach them, by sea or by air. And what if I could—what good could I do? My Arabic's terrible! My English is, too! What, should I stroll through the fields of the dead leaving sheaves of my verses under each head? No. Enough of this wretched irony-fest. Let's put on a coat. The sun's low in the west.

We were young and it was an accomplishment to have a body. No one said this. No one said much beyond “throw me that sky” or “can the lake sleep over?” The lake could not. The lake was sent home and I ate too many beets, went around with beet-blood tongue worrying about my draft card-burning brother going to war. Other brothers became holes at first base at war, then a few holes Harleying back from war in their always it seemed green jackets with pockets galore and flaps for I wondered bullets, I wondered how to worship these giants. None of them wanted to talk to me or anyone it seemed but the river or certain un-helmeted curves at high speed, I had my body and flung it over branches and fences toward my coming sullenness as the gravity of girls’ hips began and my brother marched off to march against the war. I watched different masses of bodies on tv , people saying no to the jungle with grenades and people saying no to the grenades with signs and my father saying no to all of them with the grinding of his teeth he spoke with. I’d pedal after the nos up and down a hill like it was somehow a rosary, somehow my body was a prayer I could chant by letting it loose with others like me milling around the everything below five feet tall that was ours, the everything below the adult line of sight that was ours to hold as long as we could: a year, a summer. Until the quarterback came back without . . . well, without. When the next Adonis stepped up to throw the bomb.

Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day, I sit in solitude and only hear Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay, The lost intensities of hope and fear; In those old marshes yet the rifles lie, On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags, The very books I read are there—and I Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags Its wounded length from those sad streets of war Into green places here, that were my own; But now what once was mine is mine no more, I seek such neighbours here and I find none. With such strong gentleness and tireless will Those ruined houses seared themselves in me, Passionate I look for their dumb story still, And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree. I rise up at the singing of a bird And scarcely knowing slink along the lane, I dare not give a soul a look or word For all have homes and none's at home in vain: Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt, The self-sown wheat around was like a flood, In the hot path the lizards lolled time out, The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood. Sweet Mary's shrine between the sycamores! There we would go, my friend of friends and I, And snatch long moments from the grudging wars; Whose dark made light intense to see them by ... Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots Spun from the wrangling wire; then in warm swoon The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots, We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.