502 War poems

Autumn 1914 'O England, may God punish thee!' — Is it that Teuton genius flowers Only to breathe malignity Upon its friend of earlier hours? — We have eaten your bread, you have eaten ours, We have loved your burgs, your pines' green moan, Fair Rhine-stream, and its storied towers; Your shining souls of deathless dowers Have won us as they were our own: We have nursed no dreams to shed your blood, We have matched your might not rancorously Save a flushed few whose blatant mood You heard and marked as well as we To tongue not in their country's key; But yet you cry with face aflame, 'O England, may God punish thee!' And foul in onward history, And present sight, your ancient name.

God’s blood beads on the tarmac and something rough is boiling up just this side of the vanishing point, so it’s probably time to get off this stretch of blacktop and into the wayside bar, where every cup runneth over and you breast a thickening fret of stogie smoke to get to the dank back room where a high stakes game turns against you despite your trey of jacks, and soon enough you’re in way over your head with nothing and no one to blame but the luck you’ve been getting since first you threw your stuff into a duffel bag and hooked up with the halt and lame, with the grifters and drifters, the die-hards, the masters of bluff, the very bastards, in fact, who are lifting the last of your stash. . . So it’s into the crapper and out through the window—you’re free to do whatever you must, so long as that purple-and-yellow blush in the sky doesn’t mean what it seems, so long as that lick of flame from the hard-shoulder spillage doesn’t travel as far as the scree of garbage in the lay-by, so long as that’s not your name in the red top front-page splash on the trailer-trash kidnappee. . . Just keep to the shadow-side, keep in under the lee of roadside billboards, bed down in the roadside scrub, your dream of Ithaca, that ghost town, though the rest is mystery— what brought you to this and who might take the blame, and how to get from the open road to a sight of the open sea.

Such is the story made of stubbornness and a little air, a story sung by those who danced before the Lord in quiet. Who whirled and leapt. Giving voice to consonants that rise with no protection but each other’s ears. We are on our bellies in this silence, Lord. Let us wash our faces in the wind and forget the strict shapes of affection. Let the pregnant woman hold something of clay in her hand. For the secret of patience is his wife’s patience Let her man kneel on the roof, clearing his throat, he who loved roofs, tonight and tonight, making love to her and her forgetting, a man with a fast heartbeat, a woman dancing with a broom, uneven breath. Let them borrow the light from the blind. Let them kiss your forehead, approached from every angle. What is silence? Something of the sky in us. There will be evidence, there will be evidence. Let them speak of air and its necessities. Whatever they will open, will open.

It is December 8 and my brother Tony was killed by the soldiers. December 8 and the police are reopening the Southern Trolleyways. December 8 when my wife lifts Tony’s body from the ground, his arm tied over her shoulder—her face is damp, her hair dirty. And the soldiers unveil the damn Trolleyways, and I stand feeling (a quick march of bumps across my back and thighs) nothing. When she comes home, I run a bath for Sonya and wash her hair, gently mixing the finest of my brother’s shampoos with quiet precision, while Sonya cries and cries.

I look at you, Alfonso and say to the late caterpillars good morning, Senators! this is a battle worthy of our weapons.

He came home with his right leg made a bit shorter but they didn’t notice. A landmine did it, he said to himself, and I was the only one who heard him because I followed him everywhere like a son. He hobbled when no one was looking, and I hobbled behind him. When he plucked an iris, I plucked the one next to it, and we thought of purple evening clouds. When he killed a butterfly, he’d take off the wings first, then crush it with his fingers and smell it. I tried to catch one, but it flitted away. He wanted to build a huge power plant to keep us from disappearing. I nodded and pointed out all the recent deaths, how quick they were, tomatoes not as plump as they used to be, the maple trees discolored, their branches like veins with no fat around them. All this, he decided, meant we needed new things. But I disagreed on this: why new, why not old me, I who have lived here for many years even before he was born, but he didn’t listen. Mosquitoes come and go, full and happy. Outside the window, the plant looms over the village. It looks prettier than I thought, which makes me want to kiss it, but I know it will burn my lips and I won’t be able to speak to anyone with my charred mouth. I saw him dressed up for a meeting, and they shouted, blaming him for his empty head, for wanting too much. The next time I saw him he was in bed, old and delirious. He opened his eyes, and held my hand for the first time, and said, Don’t push yourself, come back alive. He was buried in his ever-vanishing land, and I flew off into my friendless life.

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them- selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. May 1978

We tied branches to our helmets. We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank, blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbird’s target. We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off the river, slow-dragging with ghosts from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America. We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds. In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal, till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk wrestling iron through grass. We weren’t there. The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath, ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each man’s eyelid.

As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That strewed an angle of the fallow, and Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square Of charlock. Every time the horses turned Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned Upon the handles to say or ask a word, About the weather, next about the war. Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed Once more. The blizzard felled the elm whose crest I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole, The ploughman said. “When will they take it away?” “When the war’s over.” So the talk began— One minute and an interval of ten, A minute more and the same interval. “Have you been out?” “No.” “And don’t want to, perhaps?” “If I could only come back again, I should. I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year. One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.” “And I should not have sat here. Everything Would have been different. For it would have been Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good.” Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

The sun rose over the sweep of the hill All bare for the gathered hay, And a blackbird sang by the window-sill, And a girl knelt down to pray: ‘Whom Thou hast kept through the night, O Lord, Keep Thou safe through the day.’ The sun rose over the shell-swept height, The guns are over the way, And a soldier turned from the toil of the night To the toil of another day, And a bullet sang by the parapet To drive in the new-turned clay. The sun sank slow by the sweep of the hill, They had carried all the hay, And a blackbird sang by the window-sill, And a girl knelt down to pray: ‘Keep Thou safe through the night, O Lord, Whom Thou hast kept through the day.’ The sun sank slow by the shell-swept height, The guns had prepared a way, And a soldier turned to sleep that night Who would not wake for the day, And a blackbird flew from the window-sill, When a girl knelt down to pray.