[i]for Brent Stalker[/i]
If the dead could rise
To take your part,
And you lie
Bleeding in their stead,
The silent covenant
Between you bred
Of comradeship
Would not falter.
Do not rage your solvent heart.
Do not rue God’s bleeding altar.
I’d nearly forgotten that room
but lately, things appear
in the narrow, dark space
between door and linoleum:
Fingertips of palm fronds;
fragments of jungle fatigues;
love beads we wore under them.
Acrid, burning wreckage
of a helicopter delivering mail
and Christmas dinners to a hot LZ.
Foul, strange aroma
of mama-san improvising
meals out of fish heads and rice.
Thunderous roar of F-4 Phantoms
climbing in tandem, urgency in their contrails,
distant varumpf of bombs in mountains.
Sing-song complaints
of mothers moved
from ancestral villages,
their children clinging
to them like jungle vines.
Startled starlings erupt
into the safety of an empty sky
at my best friend’s funeral.
Rifle reports from the gleaming
honor guard, me on my way to war,
him, on his way to a cold permanence.
His mother’s sobs in the frozen air,
my exhaled breath in January sunlight.
Today is memorial day.
There are picnics, parades,
Wal-Mart is having one of their biggest sales,
and the car dealer in town is offering double rebates.
My hand is on the doorknob, and I hesitate,
wondering if whatever lives in this room
is tame enough now, the pain lessened
enough for me to bear.
the boy is possibly
dead already and almost
certainly dying and still
the box that holds his body
is thrown into the water
ten years old
you understand
and drugged and bound and raped
and i am spitting in the
face of god
i am sitting next to my son’s bed
and listening to his
gentle breathing
i am finding the point
at which i would
kill without regret
in the crush of
early morning fog
in this country of
missing fathers i am
waiting for myself
the dead have
all been born as
birdsong here and the
god of starving dogs
paces my street with a
young girl’s blood
staining his
smile
i let the curtain
fall back quietly
let the light
of the poem flicker
and gutter out
but always a half-beat
too late
the house is on fire
without warning
the baby is awake and
screaming
and all the doors are
locked from the
other side
this is the story i
remember
you telling
the final psalm in the
book of rusted chrome
and i never asked
to sing it
never asked to
have it sung
to me
there is still
so much silence i
am hoping to hear
not love
but fucking in a
domesticated room
where the pictures have
all been turned to
the walls
you call it religion
maybe
or maybe you’ve learned
to say nothing at all
maybe the
illusion of escape is
all that’s needed
i have bought this lie
myself
my wife
dreams of blood and
what can i do?
one a.m.
and then two
and we sit together in
the baby’s room
listen to his
tiny breathing while
insomniac poets
pray to
an indifferent god
while the newly dead
wash ashore in
california
and what is the
end result of history
but this?
five children in a
town too close to my own
who find a stray dog
in a park and decide to
torture it
decide to hang it from a
basketball hoop with
a dirty length of rope and
beat it with sticks
and at some point we
drift back to sleep
with the hope of
waking up clean
and at some point
there is nothing left
to hold onto and
so we fall
