the birds lift as one flock from the tree.
The policeman looks at me and grins. Boom, he says,
then motions for me to take his picture, posing
in the garden with his knife drawn, while beyond the wall
birds circle and sirens begin.
Friendly Fire
Section commander, stranded, soaked in his seventh hour of battle
dismounts in the vineyards near Pashmul, his vehicle bogged down
in the irrigation ditch – having just taken incoming fire,
having just lost two of his crew
to blood wounds he couldn’t tourniquet.
He radios for air strikes against the enemy. Coalition firepower
takes to the skies above them, only to miss by half a click. He listens
to the five-hundred-pounder they drop
come whistling in towards him.
Shouts at what’s left of his men to get down,
tastes dirt, feels heat, plugs one ear and thinks
Shit –
this one’s gonna be close.
Little Bird
Headed down a dirty side street after a rain,
mud churns under our tires.
Ratty-edged rugs are hung out to dry
in alleys where chickens roam, pecking the dirt,
and boys jostle each other to spit
at our truck as we drive by.
Then a small girl emerges, like a tiny brown bird.
She ducks shyly out from behind a wall. We wave
and she waves back – her sudden grin, bright as a bare bulb
amid those boy-filled alleys, her brothers hooting with sticks,
her uncles squatting to take a piss. They glare and wipe their feet
when they’re done, the way cats bury their shit.
Too late, I realize our mistake. This isn’t Kabul –
you don’t wave at girls here
even if you are one.
In the truck’s mirror as we pass, an uncle
removes his shoe and brings it down on her
again and again, her feet twisting in the dirt,
her dusty flutter of hands clutching
at her head, her dress
green as grass.
Medics on their Break
They shouldn’t smoke, but need to –
medics on their break
out by the runway or under the few trees
using smoke as some kind of expression
for what’s been done, lived, breathed.
Smoke as some kind of memory
that can be expelled through the mouth.
Their little hurt curls of thought
drifting out across the city –
the dissipate of loss.
Heavy
Witnessing the remains of another soldier
offloaded at Camp Mirage is the contracted mortician
from McKinnon and Bowes, and the camp’s chief firefighter.
They don’t go to the morgue until after supper.
It’s dark and hot. The stars
are small and still.
On the tarmac a plane, its cargo discharged,
is docking for the night – isolated
lights out on the runway
reminiscent of ships at sea.
The mortician dabs at his head with the end of his tie,
then takes it off and stuffs it in his pocket
as he walks. There are sweat patches
on his armpits and crotch.
A truck is backed, beeping
into its bay. A chain link fence
rattles. Footsteps in the gravel
beyond the gate. The lights
go on in the morgue.
The mortician and the firefighter arrive
with the necessary paperwork, waiting
to be let in.
Then someone opens the door.
It’s infinitely heavy.
At first there’s a whirlwind
in their mouths. That silent,
vacuuming suck in which nothing
can survive – not words, not sound.
Then the knowledge
is somehow gone, inexplicably leaving
as though tossed on a shore –
this body.
Fishing for Taliban
To find them I must dream the way fish do, hovering
just above the bottom in the deeper parts of the water,
unblinking, with only the occasional
fanning of my fins to keep me still.
I must dream of hiding places. I must dream the origins
of these insurgents like a birth place or a food source
to which they instinctively return.
Everything I know is inhaled through my skin
and my eyes never close.
When I swim it will be upstream, quietly gliding
side to side, mouthing the water for their smell.
Optics
The dead are supposed to be made bare
by their nothingness. Made more human
in succumbing. Their bodies stripped of myth.
But this man – a Talib – dead of an airstrike,
was something other than that, something
from a comic strip – the antagonist
who gets what he deserves and the word
SHAZZAM written in jagged letters
above his head.
He sat where the blast had thrown him
upright against a rock, head flattened
like a paper beak, privates exposed.
Still, I keep coming back to his face,
his head caved in, his one eye
blooming like a spyglass –
a telescopic pearl that if given the chance
might have predicted my future.
On the Wall
Forearms resting on the wall of the camp perimeter
with its trip flares and plastic bagged barbed wire,
I spit pomegranate seeds and watch birds among the rafters
of a guardhouse, their beaks sucking heat from the shade.
The mountains are amber in the early afternoon sun. I squint
across the city, put one of them in between my finger and thumb.
I’m not supposed to be up here – at least not without a gun or a uniform on.
A breeze kicks up and I lean out, exposed. Locals on the road
stare up at my t-shirted arms and my falling down hair. I don’t care.
For once I am huge, my hand the span of a mountain.
Down below in the gravel compound, James wanders by
on his way to get lunch, long-legged and disparaging,
his pistol hung from his hip. He yells –
What the fuck are you doing up there?
You wanna get your mother-fuckin’ head blown off?
Start of the Rainy Season
I remember a bombing in which a civilian
riding in a military convoy had been killed,
his truck tumbling over concrete barriers
and into shop fronts made from sea cans.
The rain had made everything slick
and afterwards, no one knew whose legs were whose –
somehow the medics had ended up with extras.
I heard all of this later
from the soldiers who were there.
One of them spat in the dirt.
Shook his head. Shrugged.
He told me how they always had to fight
to get this guy to wear his flak vest and helmet.
Fuckin’ civilians, he had said
as though he couldn’t afford to care.
After that,
the rain just kept coming.
Drowning in a Kharez
Someone has drowned out there – in a kharez.
What the hell is a kharez? Brian wants to know.
John launches into a description, but my brain stalls,
stuck on the shit show that this is. Drowning –
in a desert well of all things. How the world must have fallen away.
He would have been there – walking – and then suddenly gone
like the swoosh of a garbage chute, boots bent backwards,
kit clanging down the sides of a rock wall.
Jesus, he might have said.
Then maybe his vacancy would have reached a place
in the back of someone’s head – muffled water burps
like a far off fish jumping on an evening pond –
and the mad scramble would have begun
on hands and knees across the rock face, frantically
feeling the ground for an opening of some sort.
Rope – someone yelled. I need fucking rope.
Get me some rope up here now. Then in the dark,
punctuated by the plink of gravel being kicked over an edge,
his men thundered in towards that hole,
sweat shaken from their eyes, flashlights gripped in their teeth.
Get him the fuck out.
From down below they blocked out the sky.
Stars obliterated by the shapes of men crouched at a mouth.
Brian is disgusted. By which part I don’t know.
All of it, probably. We all are. Quiet
and hanging our heads. We want him back.
Jesus, John – Brian says, kicking a door, then a desk –
Why couldn’t you just have said
it was a well.
Killed by a Suicide Bomber, December 6
Big man – Floridian – don’t think you don’t know him.
Wears suspenders and a t-shirt – is tall,
talks constantly,
works private security on a highway half-built
thanks to war.
Says he’s been here for a year. Says proudly
how no one but him
has been to Panjwayi – in jeans.
He counts his near misses. Throws back his head
like a horse when he laughs.
Drinks coffee with me and swears
he won’t change for them.
Driftwood
I heard you were from B.C.
I heard how they fought for you
in the back of the armoured carrier,
telling you to breathe.
The driver’s intercom was on.
The medics that brought you in bit back tears
at the sound of your guys counting along
with compressions that just wouldn’t work.
In the hospital hall they swept you past me.
You were shirtless, your head wrapped
as though protected from sound, but I’m sure there was some
still eddying boom inside the aftermath that was you.
Later we remarked how that whole scene
had smelled like a barn, and how a photographer
had stuck his arm through the door to take pictures.
We all hated that.
Then someone said Come on.
We got more wounded.
And we did, we had four –
but the worst part was overlooking
the small details of your death, your body
heavy as an ocean, your feet
rolling
back and forth on that stretcher
like logs on a west coast beach.
Dangerous Men
I remember a village in which we sat,
the local men and us, a tiny gathering on a grass patch
bleached by the daily dump of night urine,
salty hot. I sat with my back against a fire brick wall,
sweet with smoke and crawling with flies.
The men there had laughed at my hair,
used their hands to scoop the insides out of melons,
taught me words for bird and trees and sky.
We were offered apricots, the hospitality of almonds
and we talked about the price of peace.
We didn’t know until later how dangerous
these men were, pretending to be friends of the coalition,
covering our hands with both of theirs, smiling,
letting our trucks return home in the semi-dark, unmolested.
We thought that meeting a great success.
Back in Canada we figure it out – what duplicity means –
when we hear that one of our own got his head cleaved with an axe.
He’d been sitting among the elders, sipping tea and spitting seeds
when someone slumped him into darkness.
Made of him a melon, split,
halved.
They hoped it would be enough to make us leave.
And I remember how I’d sat not six months before
in a place like that, laughing, cross legged on the ground,
my helmet off, my grimy tea glass resting against one knee –
the men with their sticky hands, sucking their fingers clean,
telling us how their district was famous for its melons,
its hospitality.
Hearing from God
I’m off by myself, stealing moments in the shade of a wall,
thumbing through books and last year’s magazines,
celebrity pregnancies that have come and gone, perfume samples
ripped from the seams. Things from another life.
Then you arrive, restless and disgruntled,
talking shit about your ex-wife –
how she’s fucking crazy, how the sex was no good,
how she won’t move out of your place.
It’s all trivial compared to our larger hurts –
like the four we just lost in Panjwayi.
We won’t know who they are until the next of kin
take over the dead and the news finally names a face.
Only then do we really know.
It’s a dread that grips the camp.
When the medevac choppers pass overhead
and the medics abandon their breakfast, sadness
strikes me, not just because of our injured –
inbound on the helipad, broken-backed and struggling to breathe –
but because you’re still holding down my books,
shouting above the page flap and rotor din
that your ex is a kook, telling you she won’t leave
until she hears from God.
Fawns
An IED goes off and two of our guys get hit,
in a convoy moving south
back to the airfield.
We are dispatched to go get them –
Ben and Big Carl.
It’s a crazy night drive.
Our trucks race through the vacant city streets, full of dust.
Above us an American gunship circles, looking for prey,
its instruments trained on the road.
I’m afraid that in the dark far below,
the pilots might mistake us
for s
omething else.
When we finally get to the scene it’s all hell and Big Carl waves.
There’s dark on his shirt and Ben shakes his head
as though there’s water in his ear.
There are headlights. A helicopter
sends dust into my mouth.
We load everyone up.
I try to drive easy, but the feel of the boom
keeps the deafened boys in the back
nervous and bracing at every invisible bump,
their hands pressed up against the roof.
The guys tell me they’re okay, but every time I look
at their new-fawn sweaty hair and torn sleeves
it’s like a shock of air to the newly born, a sharp hoof.
Flights out of Howz-e Madad
Some of our guys get medevacked back to camp,
heads wrapped in gauze, their femurs packed tight,
field dressings soaked through.
They had taken casualties – a few of them –
somewhere west of the mountains
and had to be extracted,
the chopper barely able to touch down –
too much incoming fire.
Finally they have everybody on, shuddering, strapped in,
the wounded lying nose to nose.
Beneath the whump whump of the rotor blades straining to be gone,
medic scrambles to start IVs.
Once they’re in the air, pilot says to co-pilot –
You got anything to eat?
He balances altitude with food, downs chicken fingers
stained brown with cold ketchup.
Bringing the chopper out around the backside of the mountain,
pilot glances over his shoulder at medic fighting to find a vein
then shouts above the deafening
pulse of rotor blades turning –
How’s it going back there?
Man from Uruzgan
An Afghan man hangs around outside our gate.
The things he says may or may not be believed,
his one glass eye fixed on my hand, a bird
out of bread.
My brother is dead, he says.