The Taliban took him.
The guard at the gate swears he just wants cash,
but we let him in anyway, into a room
smelling of old ass, the couch stinking of sweat.
The gate guard asks him what he knows,
but the man just shrugs, looks down at his toes –
tells us how he came all the way from Uruzgan.
He wants a cigarette, the first step
in a timeless game called give.
He wiggles a tooth, coyly
as though sweetening the deal, and says –
The Taliban tried to take me too
but then
they let me live.
Death Like Divorce
Seven in one blow. And what a blow.
A bomb so big the undercarriage of their vehicle
cracked like a tooth gone bad.
Recovery, like a harvest,
gets done by the light of the moon.
At the airport the loadies have a tough time of it,
but so does everyone – carting the bodies off to cold storage,
first one desert, then the next – a long, slow line
breaking everyone’s backs.
In Camp Mirage the bathroom stalls get etched with graffiti;
names and dates, the occasional anti-war slogan.
As if the wogs in Mirage know anything about it, we say, uncaring.
I stay up for tea and watch the stars gutter out, one by one.
Beside me on the makeshift patio, the padré
in between phone calls and on his fourth cup of coffee,
runs a hand through his hair and smiles.
He is careful not to sigh.
Death, like divorce,
must be kept from the kids.
Omar
Some myth. So they say he lost an eye
fighting the Russians. A lot of them did.
His gardeners hated him – and the newest wife,
the one with the room painted rare as raw meat,
was the first to lose a son in the bombing, hidden
optimistically in tunnels that Omar had built.
How their ears must have burst when it caved
beneath that American cavalcade – dust and dead geckos
flung from the walls, wives stumbling
beneath their burqas, the smell of rosewater and onion
on their breath since breakfast.
After that they all left – Omar and his crew,
late that night on a highway through Arghandab –
doubled up on motorbikes, one wife
burning her leg on the exhaust.
In the rush to abandon Kandahar,
Omar left his Land Cruisers and a cow behind.
But before all that, wifeless on a rooftop –
acne scarred, a nobody,
forgotten at night and swept by stars –
I wonder, was he one-eyed, or not?
Mass Murder and a Dog Fight
The boom goes up from behind a break in the mountains
and boys, stomping a cat to death in the cemetery, stop.
In the rock, an echo or two gets trapped,
funnelled up the valley. Bone splinters of noise
like a fractured rocket whistle. Then a gradual silence –
like driving away from a beach.
It is some time before the sirens happen
way south in the city.
We watch from along the wall,
off duty with our elbows hanging over,
wondering who bought it.
This time it’s civilians at a dog fight –
at least a hundred of them –
and Arghandab’s Chief of Police.
Wanting him dead, the Taliban
detonated their Datsuns in the crowd.
It had been the first time in a long time
that civilians had felt safe enough to gather,
laughing, pitting dog against dog
in the Arghandab valley.
Their echoes were caught and held
like an empty seashell,
something now void of a home –
the yelping of dogs cut
short, the cheering of boys and men
blown out of their shoes.
Hunkered down, pinned
sometimes for hours, getting shelled at night
by the enemy’s makeshift mortars, harassed
so that sleep never comes –
troops on an isolated forward operating base
west of Kandahar City joke about how they’re fine
as long as the smokes don’t run out.
They get rotated back through the airfield
every few weeks so the guys get a break,
but life still reads like a laundry list
– get hit, chopper out the wounded,
make it back to camp.
Same thing
month after month.
The comforts of home
slowly diminish,
mortars keep coming –
on the roof
someone writes
Send Smokes.
Embedded
Sticking to my chair in the camp’s tiny welfare room,
shoulder to shoulder with troops surfing the net or calling home,
I read the online paper, greedy for news – another point of view
to show me something of this place from the outside looking in.
What I read is disappointing, leaves me cold, diffused.
An article about a Pakistani journalist
giving interviews to the Taliban,
sipping tea for a story, watching ambushes unfold.
It only takes a moment for me to run my thoughts
like a skewer through the back of every armoured carrier
that’s seen its hull cracked, its seats torn apart, witness marks
left in dark red on the ceiling. This was someone’s heart.
If I had a picture, I could point to the facts.
They were here and here and here, when they landed –
those soldiers that got caught in that IED attack,
flung hard, like something coming off the top
of a violent spin cycle.
And here is where the armour on their carrier gave out.
And here are their water bottles and ration packs
and foil wrappers and bits of burnt kit strewn about.
And here is the shit culvert that they didn’t spot –
the little pile of rocks disguising jerry cans and command wires
that lead back through the grapevines.
And farther up on the ridgeline overlooking all this
the Pakistani journalist and his Taliban hosts
would have stood, watching a Canadian convoy
approach in the distance, raising dust clouds a mile long.
Panjwayi
Four more soldiers died today – dismounted,
handing out children’s things in Panjwayi.
A bicycle bomber
pedalled past and detonated,
taking children with him.
Fuck, Joe says when I tell him.
Fuck Fuck Fuck
If he’d been wearing a hat
he would have thrown it down.
I stare up at the sky.
Joe spits on the ground.
Some of his closest friends
were out there.
Not
Wasting Time on Griefs that Don’t Matter
I make friends with a girl from another camp.
Her room is nicer than mine, stacked with books
and hung with scarves – beautiful curtains to nowhere.
No windows because there might be mortars,
but there’s a vodka bottle hidden in one corner
beneath a heap of laundry she hasn’t had time to do
and her bed with the duck down comforter
hasn’t seen much use.
She calls it her battlespace – a place to wage war.
On afternoons when I was in camp, she’d hand me her keys
on the way out the door, red hair flying
telling me to make myself at home.
I used to wonder what she could possibly find to fight
in darkness that soft.
Then I learn this week she lost a friend and last month a lover.
They were both so out of the blue, she says. I had to choose
who to grieve. One got hit in his truck
and the other – here she shakes her head, shrugs –
She tells me it was a no-brainer, that she can’t waste time
on the griefs that don’t matter. But it still doesn’t cover
the fact that nothing out here is ever gradual.
Whether it comes in the mail or explodes on the road
our hearts go hurtling forward inside the wreckage
long after everything else has stopped.
Halfway House
I think of it as a halfway house – Camp Mirage –
a place between war and home
where we write letters and wear shorts
and watch outdoor movies from our lawn chairs
in the sand of the volleyball court. Guys make jokesabout Afcrackistan.
At the Canex we buy new sheets in which to sleep
and Dubai silverware to send home because it’s cheap.
There’s even a bus that will take you to the Emirates mall.
If you’re lucky you’ll see the camel jockeys
on their tracks of sand, racing alongside the highway
and the stable boys carrying tea to the powerful, perfumed sheikhs,
their white dish-dash flapping in the breeze.
All this, as you find your way to the souk
to buy pearls
or a ring.
Also at the halfway house
between war and home, the bodies come temporarily to rest,
bumping down in their soundless metal isolation, offloaded,
then the plane refuels. The pilots hunch tiredly over tea.
The loadies stand out on the runway, glovedand smothered by heat.
It’s a different desert for them. Not opulent, but removed.
They get what’s leftover.
They get the dead.
Seasons in Kandahar
I’m sitting near the runway, a place of grace and great thumps,
watching aircraft come hurtling in and out,
watching heat lines recede, bleeding sunset
into rows of willow trees dry as a furnace.
The air smells fungal with sewage and old November –
how supper comes across on the tongue, pungent
as meat pie. The pilots line up to eat –
or send someone to get it.
Hunkered on a bench, hands hugging a cold cup of coffee,
I watch as heat fades from the day and the crows fly
away from the fast food trailers on the boardwalk, repatriated
back to their mountains.
Beyond the mechanical wind-up of rotors
lifting medevac crews into the air, my eyes hold them going –
a line of ragged black dots on the horizon.
Self Immolation
When there is no voice but this. Fire. Lit
with a kerosene fuelled spark. As if to say –
Watch me. It flares up
from her feet, then engulfs
her heart, frantically
beat out by her mother
before it reaches her face.
The hospitals here are unequipped.
Her sisters have gathered, wailing
in the hallways, their children clinging
to their legs. Her mother sits, slumped
against the wall.
There’s nothing the doctors can do.
This morning when they brought her in
she cried out in agony, her hands a crazy spasm,
fingers melted to the bone.
Now she is whimperless, alone on her bed.
Breathing through a piece of muslin
wet as wet leaves, she will take
twenty-four hours to die.
Life in a Cemetery
Graveyards in Kandahar –
not the same as they are back home.
Not manicured and full of flowers, but dusty,
shallow, heaped up, full of stones.
If you die a martyr here, a flag – either green or white –
will flutter, torn on a pole near the rocks at your head
until the constant flap of wind
pulls it loose.
Strangers will come and call you brother, or uncle.
Prayers will be said and your scarves will be re-hung,
your grave place decorated with pieces of salt
said to cure ailments and infertility –
you’re that holy.
Women will put these pieces of you under their tongue.
Children will go there, to your cemetery
to chase or stone cats, to make a dog drop
whatever it is he is carrying away.
You’ll hear the Jingle Trucks on the road, their horns
like something stripped from a carnival
and bursts of gunfire, meaning
either marriage or death.
At night young men will stroll past your feet,
giggling, eyes lined with kohl,
and disappear among the myriad
stone mounds, holiness forgotten.
If you had eyes left to open, you’d see them through the dark
by the graves at your feet, caught up in each other,
green-eyed like racoons, feet shoulder width apart.
The Only Chair in the Room
My roommate is a lesbian.
Dark-haired, with a Newfie’s grin.
Don’t ask, don’t tell, the guys say, laughing
as I head in through my door.
Sometimes she makes my bunk for me
and when I’m out, worries
that I might not be back, and when I am, worries
over whether or not I’ll be warm enough at night.
She loans me her spare quilt and shares all the junk food
from the care packages that she gets.
Samantha-sends-them-like, she says.
Her accent makes it sound like all one word.
The guys poke fun and ask what it’s like
to shower with one. One what? I say,
knowing exactly what they mean.
I don’t tell them she’s more modest than me
or that a long time ago she used to date a guy
who just died from an RPG strike in that last firefight.
She cried her eyes out that day.
Or how the other night when the rockets came flying inwe happened to trap
some sort of ridiculous, hairless mouse on stic
ky paper
and how that was the thing that made us both run shrieking, helmets on,
for the only chair in the room.
Dust Storm at Kandahar Airfield
We are walking up the road at the airfield, Christian and I,
as though walking off the edge of the world
one tent at a time – huddled, stooped against the wind,
our scarves fluttering, tattered
like the edges of flags.
A minute ago it was afternoon.
Now a god-like fist of dust and sand
has clenched daylight off at the heart.
Ahead, Canada House appears in the gritty gloom,
dome-like, a lonely ark where troops filter out in ones and twos
past the foosball tables and cigarette butt cans,
their smokes in hand.
They’ve just held another memorial.
We go in, half-blind, to the smell of hot chocolate,
our faces stiff with dirt.
The atmosphere is hushed.
Of all the fucking luck, someone says.
I step aside. Let the troops file by
and out into the dust.
The canvas flap falls behind me,
cutting out the sound of wind, the sight
of tiny white lights swinging
wildly between the tents – a far string of stars
tossed on a whirlwind.
Forecast
Wind wakes me this morning.
The sound of a door banging –
open, closed. Open, closed.
Outside a grey stretch of clouds
hangs over the city. There’s rain
and more bombings.
It’s the Taliban’s winter push for superiority
and lately the forecast has been the same –
cold wet wind and suicide fires,
ash mixed into rain.
Dangling my feet off the edge of my bunk,
I keep my blankets wrapped around my shoulders
and wish for something gentler than what the day is sure to bring –
the threat of metal, driven, exploded into stone.
I wish we could tunnel under
this weather, mole-like – burrow