502 War poems

It showed the War was as my father said: boredom flanked by terror, a matter of keeping low and not freezing. “You wore your helmet square,” he said, not “at some stupid angle, like that draft-dodger Wayne,” who died so photogenically in The Sands of Iwa Jima. Those nights I heard shouts from the dark of my parents’ room, he was back down in his foxhole, barking orders, taking fire that followed him from France and Germany, then slipped into the house, where it hunkered in the rafters and thrived on ambush. We kept our helmets on, my mother and I, but there was no cover, and our helmets always tilted. He’d lump us with the ones he called “JohnDoes,” lazy, stupid, useless. We needed to straighten up and fly right, pick it up, chop chop, not get “nervous in the service.” We’d duck down like GIs where German snipers might be crouched in haylofts, their breaths held for the clean shot. “Bang,” my father said, “the dead went down, some like dying swans, some like puppets with their strings cut.” I wanted to hear more, but he’d change the subject, talk about the pennant, the Cards’ shaky odds, how Musial was worth the whole JohnDoe lot of them.

Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Through the windows—through doors—burst like a ruthless force, Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation, Into the school where the scholar is studying, Leave not the bridegroom quiet—no happiness must he have now with his bride, Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain, So fierce you whirr and pound you drums—so shrill you bugles blow. Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Over the traffic of cities—over the rumble of wheels in the streets; Are beds prepared for sleepers at night in the houses? no sleepers must sleep in those beds, No bargainers’ bargains by day—no brokers or speculators—would they continue? Would the talkers be talking? would the singer attempt to sing? Would the lawyer rise in the court to state his case before the judge? Then rattle quicker, heavier drums—you bugles wilder blow. Beat! beat! drums!—blow! bugles! blow! Make no parley—stop for no expostulation, Mind not the timid—mind not the weeper or prayer, Mind not the old man beseeching the young man, Let not the child’s voice be heard, nor the mother’s entreaties, Make even the trestles to shake the dead where they lie awaiting the hearses, So strong you thump O terrible drums—so loud you bugles blow.

What if I didn’t shoot the old lady running away from our patrol, or the old man in the back of the head, or the boy in the marketplace? Or what if the boy—but he didn’t have a grenade, and the woman in Hue didn’t lie in the rain in a mortar pit with seven Marines just for food, Gaffney didn’t get hit in the knee, Ames didn’t die in the river, Ski didn’t die in a medevac chopper between Con Thien and Da Nang. In Vietnamese, Con Thien means place of angels. What if it really was instead of the place of rotting sandbags, incoming heavy artillery, rats and mud. What if the angels were Ames and Ski, or the lady, the man, and the boy, and they lifted Gaffney out of the mud and healed his shattered knee? What if none of it happened the way I said? Would it all be a lie? Would the wreckage be suddenly beautiful? Would the dead rise up and walk?

( in Memoriam F. W. G.) Orion swung southward aslant Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant With the heather that twitched in the wind; But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these, Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow, And wondered to what he would march on the morrow. The crazed household-clock with its whirr Rang midnight within as he stood, He heard the low sighing of her Who had striven from his birth for his good; But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze, What great thing or small thing his history would borrow From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow. When the heath wore the robe of late summer, And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun, Hung red by the door, a quick comer Brought tidings that marching was done For him who had joined in that game overseas Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.

Since it always begins in the unlikeliest place we start in an obsolete country on no current map. The camera glides over flower beds, for this is a southern climate. We focus on medals, a horse, on a white uniform, for this is June. The young man waves to the people lining the road, he lifts a child, he catches a rose from a wrinkled woman in a blue kerchief. Then we hear shots and close in on a casket draped in the Austrian flag. Thirty-one days torn off a calendar. Bombs on Belgrade; then Europe explodes. We watch the trenches fill with men, the air with live ammunition. A close-up of a five-year-old living on turnips. Her older sister, my not-yet-mother, already wearing my daughter’s eyes, is reading a letter as we cut to a young man with thick glasses who lies in a trench and writes a study of Ibsen. I recognize him, he is going to be my father, and this is his way of keeping alive. Snow. Blood. Lice. Frostbite. Grenades. Stretchers. Coffins. Snow. Telegrams with black borders. On the wide screen my father returns bringing his brother’s body; my mother’s father brings back his son’s from the opposite edge. They come together under the oaks of the cemetery. All who will be my family are here, except my sister, who is not yet imagined. Neither am I, who imagine this picture, who now jump to my snowy birthday in the year of the million-mark loaf of bread. My early years are played by a blue-eyed child who grows up quickly, for this is a film of highlights, like all documentaries false to the life—the work of selective memory, all I can bear of a painful childhood. The swastika appears and remains as the huge backdrop against which we’re seen. The sound track of a hysterical voice is threatening us. We’re heard as whispers. Shortly before my city bursts into flames, my stand-in disappears from the film, which continues with scenes of terror and death I can’t bear to watch. I pick up a new reel, a strange sequel set in a different location and made in another language, in which I am back. The colors are bright, the sound track is filled with music, the focus gentle. A man is beside me. Time-lapse photography picks up the inchmeal growth of daughters toward the sky, the slow subversion of dark by gray hair. Little happens. The camera sums up the even flow of many years in a shot of a river. The principals from part one are missing, except for me who am the connection. The time is now, and I am playing myself.

Staring up into the tank's belly lit by a bare bulb hanging down off the exhaust, a mechanic's hands are up inside the dark metallic innards doing something that looks personal, private. This tank is nothing like the ones the Americans deploy. Those have uranium piercing shells that could melt right through this tank's armor and set off the ammo box: nothing can withstand the American tanks. The barrel's called a cannon. The machine guns they call deterrents. The tank is old, small, about the size of a horse and cart. The armor plate shines green under the streetlight. The sprockets, almost rusted out. Somebody forgot to grease the nipples. The timing belt is nicked and worn. The spare parts from France don't fit. This wire crossed with this wire makes a catastrophic fire. Be careful how you route it. .20 caliber ammo goes in the hatch behind the armor plate. The mechanic on his back in the dirt, cursing in Arabic, sounds like he's cursing in a good-natured way: who was the fucking moron who did the maintenance on this thing? This tank, this tank, he should push it off a cliff into the sea so that it could bob for half an hour before sinking under the Pigeon Rocks where all the lovers gather in the shadows near that little bar, lit by a generator, that serves arak and warm beer to soldiers hanging out on the Corniche: mainly conscripts from down south, whose orange groves rot because nobody can pick the oranges: try to pick an orange and a cluster bomb lodged in leaves comes tumbling into your basket. What weight oil did this cocksucker use, anyway? And this engine, it's gonna blow. Beat up tanks and sandbags, that's all this army is, old sparkplugs that get fouled so that you have to file the gaps over and over. He stares up in that live, minute, completely concentrated way of scrutinizing something or someone you thought you understood: the tank's underbody completely covers his body so they look like they're embracing when he reaches up inside it, his needle nose pliers crimping, twisting, pulling down hard. There, you see that, it's all corroded. The cannon jutting out looks both threatening and vulnerable as if the tank's firepower were dependent on that wire. He runs two fingers up and down it, then feels where rust, mixed into an oily paste, shines like bloody flux that he gently dips his finger in, sniffs and tastes. Clanging back his tapping on the armor plate, as he listens to her talking on his back in the dirt, screwing in the spare parts, the tank says what tanks always say, Fix me, oil me, grease me, make it fit, confirming what he knows about the French.

La Belgique ne regrette rien Not with her ruined silver spires, Not with her cities shamed and rent, Perish the imperishable fires That shape the homestead from the tent. Wherever men are staunch and free, There shall she keep her fearless state, And homeless, to great nations be The home of all that makes them great.

Ah! What avails the classic bent And what the cultured word, Against the undoctored incident That actually occurred?

When I ran, it rained. Late in the afternoon— midsummer, upstate New York, mornings I wrote, read Polish history, and there was a woman whom I thought about; outside the moody, humid American sublime—late in the afternoon, toward sundown, just as the sky was darkening, the light came up and redwings settled in the cattails. They were death's idea of twilight, the whole notes of a requiem the massed clouds croaked above the somber fields.Lady of eyelashes, do you hear me? Whiteness, otter's body, coolness of the morning, rubbed amber and the skin's salt, do you hear me? This is Poland speaking, “era of the dawn of freedom,” nineteen twenty-two.

Fiddle no further, Führer. Rome is built. It took all day. Now let us so love the world. I’m just thinking out loud. My stigmata bring out my eyes. The smallpox uses every part of  the blanket, and the forest is a lady’s purse. The Indian is a pink Chihuahua peeking his head from the designer zipper. Out here it’s mostly light from the fifteenth century slamming into the planet. I can’t see the forest for the burn unit. All the planet does is bitch bitch bitch. I know it’s last minute but could you put out my eyes? At the subatomic level, helmeted gods help themselves to gold. Up here? The body’s an isolation ward.