Our Long War
If we are at war let the orchards show it,
let the pear and fig fall prior to their time,
let the radios die
and the hounds freeze over their meat,
let the balconies crack their planked backs as we recline,
let the streets of stock and trade split open,
let the horses pulling at the fields
wither beneath us.
Let each year decay and each decade:
to receive report is not enough,
equations of the mathematician must
each come wrong, strangely, inexplicably, the remedies
must run dry,
the violet must let no more tincture
and the waters no more cool.
When, at mudtimes, we trek to the waterfall,
there it should no longer be —
nothing should fall where the guidebook says,
not orchids, not taro,
not the market, not the fishmonger thrashing carp against rock
where once we bought it bloody on the board.
If we are at war with a holy book in our hands
let it shrivel to slag; its teachings
cannot survive the drone
and will not gleam while villagers drink the ditch.
If we wage it, let the war breach up
into the light, let it unseam our garments
where they hold fast, let each button and string fail
until we run to hide ourselves
in alleys where at least rats and refuse
and the sleeping poor show some partial ghost
of what’s abroad.
If we war there ought to be a sign.
Our lives should feel like cut-outs of lives,
paper dolls drifting to the ground,
ready for chalk outlines.
But still our horses ripple their flanks
and the orange grove shakes green in the warm wind it loves.
We laze on the balcony with clear water in the glass.
At the newsstand stacks of cigarettes
with their sure wrappings and that little red pull, candies and juices
made of wild thriving corn.
In winter we ornament fountains with Christmas lights,
in spring more falsely, and more falsely,
the scent of heather and sedge grows rich through the transom.
Before the war
the soul
spoke so clearly
we took it for an imbecile.
But now the war can’t know what it wants:
we make meals, pay a tax, and dream nothing
hard enough to wake us.
Not once have I dreamt of the war.
I forgot it quietly, unwantingly, and because
there were peaches everywhere, peaches
that shouldn’t have happened,
nor the idea of blessing at sundown,
the orchard lit into an avenue
of torchlight.
Still Life
Down by the pond, addicts sleep
on rocky grass half in water, half out,
and there the moon lights them
out of tawny silhouettes into the rarest
of amphibious flowers I once heard called striders ,
between, but needing, two worlds.
Of what can you accuse them now,
beauty?
Immigrant Hospital
Bobigny
Chalky as white spruce
in hill fog pressed away from Sacre Coeur,
not one in seventy tongues
that make love acute and possessed are speaking now
their dozens of faiths and doubts. Just chrome whisperings,
endearments. Still, the priest of these wards must know
which voice, which prayer,
which he finds eases. Which unfolds
a rope ladder from this housefire, which will not
sleep but comes into the metal bed
after the nurses go and chants your own secret
incompletion into death. All I want, I said,
is to know this.
Visit the sick, he answered.
Makeshift Hospital
Baghdad
Night —
the common hours
for loosened souls
to be hastened into the kingdom
of unspecified light.
Theory of War
Admit coming upon the fallen horse at evening,
now asleep but withered, now reducing as you near, now
a dell pony at your feet beneath the alder dead,
admit it is too much to both see and bear. You must
either not see or not bear, or see and bear
some quickened portion, the portion allotted to say
this is simply the field
of what occurs on earth.
The Lord Is a Man of War
The Lord is a man of war
I read by window and wick
and for once I believed
the book of Exodus true
the origin of our points sharpened
with fire our axes bows our pikes
and finally I could see
the
If we are at war let the orchards show it,
let the pear and fig fall prior to their time,
let the radios die
and the hounds freeze over their meat,
let the balconies crack their planked backs as we recline,
let the streets of stock and trade split open,
let the horses pulling at the fields
wither beneath us.
Let each year decay and each decade:
to receive report is not enough,
equations of the mathematician must
each come wrong, strangely, inexplicably, the remedies
must run dry,
the violet must let no more tincture
and the waters no more cool.
When, at mudtimes, we trek to the waterfall,
there it should no longer be —
nothing should fall where the guidebook says,
not orchids, not taro,
not the market, not the fishmonger thrashing carp against rock
where once we bought it bloody on the board.
If we are at war with a holy book in our hands
let it shrivel to slag; its teachings
cannot survive the drone
and will not gleam while villagers drink the ditch.
If we wage it, let the war breach up
into the light, let it unseam our garments
where they hold fast, let each button and string fail
until we run to hide ourselves
in alleys where at least rats and refuse
and the sleeping poor show some partial ghost
of what’s abroad.
If we war there ought to be a sign.
Our lives should feel like cut-outs of lives,
paper dolls drifting to the ground,
ready for chalk outlines.
But still our horses ripple their flanks
and the orange grove shakes green in the warm wind it loves.
We laze on the balcony with clear water in the glass.
At the newsstand stacks of cigarettes
with their sure wrappings and that little red pull, candies and juices
made of wild thriving corn.
In winter we ornament fountains with Christmas lights,
in spring more falsely, and more falsely,
the scent of heather and sedge grows rich through the transom.
Before the war
the soul
spoke so clearly
we took it for an imbecile.
But now the war can’t know what it wants:
we make meals, pay a tax, and dream nothing
hard enough to wake us.
Not once have I dreamt of the war.
I forgot it quietly, unwantingly, and because
there were peaches everywhere, peaches
that shouldn’t have happened,
nor the idea of blessing at sundown,
the orchard lit into an avenue
of torchlight.
Still Life
Down by the pond, addicts sleep
on rocky grass half in water, half out,
and there the moon lights them
out of tawny silhouettes into the rarest
of amphibious flowers I once heard called striders ,
between, but needing, two worlds.
Of what can you accuse them now,
beauty?
Immigrant Hospital
Bobigny
Chalky as white spruce
in hill fog pressed away from Sacre Coeur,
not one in seventy tongues
that make love acute and possessed are speaking now
their dozens of faiths and doubts. Just chrome whisperings,
endearments. Still, the priest of these wards must know
which voice, which prayer,
which he finds eases. Which unfolds
a rope ladder from this housefire, which will not
sleep but comes into the metal bed
after the nurses go and chants your own secret
incompletion into death. All I want, I said,
is to know this.
Visit the sick, he answered.
Makeshift Hospital
Baghdad
Night —
the common hours
for loosened souls
to be hastened into the kingdom
of unspecified light.
Theory of War
Admit coming upon the fallen horse at evening,
now asleep but withered, now reducing as you near, now
a dell pony at your feet beneath the alder dead,
admit it is too much to both see and bear. You must
either not see or not bear, or see and bear
some quickened portion, the portion allotted to say
this is simply the field
of what occurs on earth.
The Lord Is a Man of War
The Lord is a man of war
I read by window and wick
and for once I believed
the book of Exodus true
the origin of our points sharpened
with fire our axes bows our pikes
and finally I could see
the
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