Poetry
She kissed me.
Kerosene tongue under a charcoal sky,
and what could I do
but burn? But yearn
for more of that
thistle fire tingle on my lips.
She kissed me.
I could melt glaciers with this.
September, 1918
It has been a year,
two months, five days
and this morning
since last my eyes
were full of you.
I do not know where
your head last slept,
where last you stepped,
where your body
my god save it
carries you right now.
I cannot even hear
the guns from here.
I cannot even hear them
and the post man
never brings news.
I am going out to sea.
I have stolen father’s boat
and a hundred bottles
from the milk man’s shop.
I will sail out as far as I dare
and fill the sea with them
and beg the world to spin
a bottle into your hands,
in every one, a letter to you
and a lock of my hair.
I have shorn it all off!
I have worried it out
and I have torn it out
and you may not think
me beautiful when
you finally come home
my god bring him home
but at least you will be home
and I hope, I hope safely.
Last night,
I chopped down a cedar tree,
only its trunk
was your trunk,
and your belly its bark,
and the arc of the axe
my whetstone tongue.
A waterfall spilled out
and black goldfish too,
hundreds of them,
a pregnancy of tiny scaled gods,
pouring all down your thighs
black goldfish flashes
and every time
I kissed your trembling lips
they’d ignite and burn to ashes.
The fish, I mean,
because your lips no longer burn,
but I kissed them all the same
until all your black goldfish
whirled in white ash eddies
like snow dust around us.
What left to do
but what next I did?:
I put them back,
packed the crack in your bark
with the burnt snow
of all the tiny goldfish
you spilled onto my tongue.
You are a little like a brass birdcage:
a cherry-red cardinal inhabits you,
but even if your door were left open,
it would not spread its wings, it would not
sing, it would only linger on its perch,
plumed head tucked, waiting for the
night’s veil to cover you and bury
it within shadow’s silent smother.
If only the birdcage were not there;
if only.
Peleliu, October 1944
The clouds black out the moon.
We skitter in pairs, Makoto & I.
At the first foxhole,
a dark shape rises up
and I do what they taught me:
I thrust the bayonet in,
just beneath the diaphragm,
into the space where the breath
and the body meet.
The American rolls over.
He doesn’t scream,
the way men usually do.
When I pull my bayonet free,
there is just one long
grooooooooaaaaaaaaann,
like there is a big bag of
sorrow in his belly and
all of it is pouring out,
all pouring out
with the rest of him.
He shudders once
and never moves again.
Makoto’s eyes are white ghosts.
Shaking, we move on to
the next dark foxhole.
August, 1865
You trudge home,
finally, after months under
the sun and the dust,
shades darker, bronzed
and withered and caked
up to your knees in mud
and more.
Your sons have grown
into farmers while
you were gone.
They have tilled the fields
and sown the seeds,
and although you look
like you might fall over,
you wander out into
the rows of potatoes, kneel down
and pick up a handful of earth.
Only some of it washes off.
Much of it never will,
but you are home
and that is enough.
You plagiarized your heart, love,
copied it uncredited from storybooks
the rest of us have abandoned.
Don’t you know that our hearts
are salted and stowed
in the echoing holds of the
storm-tossed hulks
to which we resigned our fates?
Like you, we pickled our dreams
in barrels of paper and ink.
You’ll sink with the rest of us, love,
you’ll drown amid the uncredited echoes
of our extinguished ambitions:
you will fail, you will fail, you will fail.
Swept beneath the keel
or faceless in the flood:
understand, love, that your words
are only new to yourself.
Curled against your hip in this shallow ditch,
I can almost forget the slow whine of
far-off mortar fire. I can almost forget the blood
that cakes the dust to your pant leg. I can almost
forget that tomorrow I will carry your
body fourteen miles on my shoulders.
The Belgian night is quiet, and for a while,
the only things raining down on us are the quivering lights
of all the stars over Europe, and for a while,
I am pretending this shallow muddy ditch is a bed
in New Hampshire, with white linens,
many pillows, and your skin.
In your diary,
you’ve drawn little apricots
with faces: smiling, laughing apricots,
melancholy apricots–
little Spartan apricots driving
little Persian apricots off
black Greek cliffs.
On page 63, your daily apricot
is missing, and I like to think
he is off on some adventure,
lost in the labyrinthine underbelly
of hospital sprawl
your passage describes.
Every apricot in June shrinks,
sketched in fainter penstrokes:
ragged apricots until
the cusp of July
and a final apricot.
Ghost-eyed, half-formed,
he is staring up at me,
but no longer seeing.
These cords keep her from splitting,
wound round and round,
over breast and under breast
and back and forth across
belly flesh and lumbar curve,
settled down over hip swells,
pelvic bone.
Fibers, fibers,
crosshatch and diamond braid,
a texture for every inch of pale flesh:
weight of the knot here,
lark’s head, wound back upon itself.
There is newfound strength
in corseting and constraint:
apple core, hourglass,
trunk of the oak tree, wheat sheaf,
bound under the cleanest sun.
Even concaved, she is radiant.