far beneath the trees, unseen
into milkweed-feathered nests.
Then those blood and rain puddles
held captive in the craters
of Kandahar’s shitty main road
would be far above us, and the mess –
the asphalt memory of yesterday’s boom
that got buried in that soldier’s knees and face
like a shattered dinner plate –
would be several stratum away,
mistaken by us in our dry, deep holes
for nothing more than the rumbling
of an inconsequential thunder.
Disconnected
We drive by the remains of a suicide bomber –
his hair a bloody ruff held aloft by a policeman.
He is proud to have found it, like a mutt
shaking out the prize of his mane.
I was sunk deep within myself, thinking of my daughter
swinging her bucket in the rain on the way to the compost heap,
and me – married, steeped, hip deep in the green fields of home
when I saw the hole where the bomber’s face should have been.
Its oval of open bone endings, jaws
pried apart.
My heart jolted, involuntary
as a tongue running over a loose tooth.
For a moment I was that bloody space –
that bundle of raw nerves where the air hits and makes pain.
I thought about how this man was born
the same as any man I’ve known.
The policeman grins as we pass,
shoving the head into a bag, and I am torn
between worlds –
my daughter at home in her bare feet, scattering
eggshells and ash
and this bombed out vehicle to my right,
a popping metal fire
where they keep finding teeth.
Taliban
I am one of the faithful. I live among those
who line their eyes with kohl, who skim the top
off the opium crop, giggling when we get caught
behind a compound wall, our pants pulled down,
a boy in our mouth. I learn what I’ve been taught –
to sting the invaders until they are stunned.
It is what God has provisioned.
Commanders tell us that our past is glorious –
a blazing line of sacrifice –
and that our future will be rewarded.
They tell us war is when we rest in God. But we’re still young.
Sometimes we quake, our hands shaking in the aftermath.
We bury what dead we can, stealing their sandals
then rubbing eggplant on our wounds. Taking opium at noon
in the secrecy of the vineyard, I numb
my own fear. When I close my eyes
I can’t be seen.
When the shock of war wears off we brag
about our ability to vanish into villages, silently
reciting the Arabic history of words we’d never heard
until Al Qaeda came.
At night we name the invaders, invoking
longwinded and passionate phrases
about how we’ll kill them. When darkness falls
we huddle up, hungry, holding hands,
long bones of cold woven within our interrupted sleep.
In the morning we eat grapes off the ground.
When the helicopters come we run or lie still –
anything to avoid their guns. Even in the dark
they can make your body fly apart, your mouth
open without sound. The same thing we crave
for the invaders, may we prick them
according to what is promised.
Support is drummed up on the dust of our heels,
our governance given in the form of ultimatums,
the blood of teachers, the measurement of beards.
Shame on you if you’re split between the legs –
you women, keep your foulness hidden – still,
your fear is what fascinates. If I got you alone
I’d jab my fingers into the damp centre of that pain.
Education is irrelevant. We praise God without it.
Insist on this so-called right and we’ll marry you
to dirt. Bloodshed is what sells to the illiterate
in the marketplaces of Afghanistan. I stroll
through the city at will, my hands clasped
behind my back. My newness gone,
A Night in Hospital
A Taliban fighter, staring, drugged,
dragged wounded from the desert fight,
hangs his head against the bed and won’t look away.
He touches himself while I turn my back
and fake sleep on my side.
I shut my eyes.
Drinking is hard. Fluid drips from an IV hooked to my arm.
Rustle and pump beneath the covers, I hear the Talib
and his one free hand getting a slow start on himself
until a medic walks by and yells –
Knock that shit off.
Fever comes and goes, then night falls for us all.
Little Afghan girl in the far corner, caught
in the same fight as the Taliban, whimpers,
clutching her stomach wound and donated doll.
All I have is appendicitis.
Lying there, feeling dumb, no choice
but to listen and wait for the medics to come give her another dose,
I try to steel myself against her voice, thin as soup,
to keep balanced on the knife edges of sleep.
But the visuals keep running a loop –
that Taliban fighter, cuffed one-handed in the bed to my right.
He fixes my face in his emaciated gaze. Jackknifing
beneath the sheets, he gets himself off, then drools
blood into a bucket.
Ahmadullah’s Toes
The only tree in the garden of the camp is auditory –
full of birds, and hot smelling, like geraniums in July.
It holds my shadow in late afternoon, where I sit
beneath its latticework of branches.
I watch the ants criss-cross the bricks at my feet and envy
their progress – inherent, like pink hitting sky, foretelling night.
Their march of leaves goes on. Unlike us,
their reconstruction, unopposed.
If I stay here long enough the old Afghan gardener smiles
and brings me grapes.
I wonder – what does he think I miss the most?
His youngest boy walks by with a basket of bread,
bare feet scuffing in the sand and it’s this –
the togetherness of his little toes,
the wholeness of his head and little wrist band,
his heels rough as salt
that cracks me like a watch face.
August
One hand on his head to keep him from sitting up,
his face flecked with foam – someone else’s.
One hand on his wrist to keep tabs on his pulse.
For some reason I strain to hear it, confused
by the roar of the carrier backed up to the door
and the shouts and the shit stink
and the silhouettes of more wounded being brought in.
He asks – Where’s Brogue? How’s B
rogue?
His breathing kicks in like a sob. He has half a pant leg
hanging off and one boot on, dangling,
his eyes fixed on the ceiling.
In that moment I can count each of his blinks,
the slow motion, open-close of his mind
replaying the whole thing – what he did
or should have done.
And I know Brogue’s dead, not five minutes ago.
Only I don’t tell him – instead I say, pausing,
that he did everything right.
Everything.
So now he knows.
And this time when I lay my hand on his head
he doesn’t say a word – not one.
Naming the Sound that Took His Life
Ahmadullah.
Something like the whump of one
rotor blade, busting air
or jet afterburner caught
cupped in the hand
or cut short, a thunder clap
asphyxiating
its own wind.
Something like stillness in the mouth
or the spontaneous
combustion of leaves, a static
crackle of noise
that plumbs the deaf
eardrums like a sun
burst, blooming.
Then something like keening,
the awesome vowel of a mountain cave
calling and re-calling
the consonants of birds
dropped dead from a tree.
Notes on a Soldier
Shows me the carpets he bought.
Shows me his heart, or parts of –
the parts I haven’t forgotten.
Admits to a daughter.
Runs like the wind,
but doesn’t really bother.
Likes cats and kicking ass, hates being
behind the wire.
Shrugs a lot.
Displays fake breasts on his desk,
forgetting I’m there, then says
the days he’s on a level
are just luck.
Car Bomb
There’s a lock down in the middle of the day,
out by the arches at the eastern entrance to the city.
Afghan police receive word
that a suicide bomber is on his way.
Now every car left sitting by the side of the road,
every fruit cart and taxi cab is cause for alarm.
Backed off a bit in our row of trucks we have a good view.
There’s not much else we can do.
The traffic piles up in the heat. Trunks get searched
and police in bad suits start waving them through.
We roll in slow, like a bead of sweat. Past the bleating of goats,
children in the back of a van, their hands
pressed up against the glass,
heat smouldering off every hood, cars hemming us in.
Beneath that hard blue sky – a sweltering
mile line of taxis that makes us know
we’ll never know
which one’s about to go up,
the one far enough away that we live
or the one close enough that we don’t feel a thing.
Burying the Rabbit
At home her pet bunny dies.
Here, IEDS are unearthed,
find after find.
On the phone I try to talk to her, in between rockets
and thousands of miles away –
the connection is terrible. Her sobs
on delay. I have to keep saying –
Honey, what did you say?
What happened to the bunny?
I hate all this noise. I hate everything
but her voice.
She tells me Daddy is helping her
and hangs up. One hiccup
caught alone
at the end of the receiver.
Market Scarf
Red like leaves in the fall, you covered me
on a cot, inside a hot tent like a greenhouse
that turned sweat into shivers when night came.
You were that fragment of brick that the sun hits.
Then after we sent another one of our own
home in a box and I stayed up at night
among guys snoring in the dark –
you covered me as I wrote. And when I ran
on KAF’s shit-coloured roads. One edge
wrapped around my mouth like a local
trying to keep the dust out.
You were an easy taste to acquire. Fire-coloured,
an RPG magnet inside the camp’s wire. The guys
laughed and steered clear, asking –
weren’t there any others?
It was hard to let it all go. I wore the smell of this place
far into your threads so I wouldn’t forget
the feeling you kept
on my shoulders at night and how I stayed
awake until dawn, writing
metaphors for loss,
similes for red.
Rain
This evening, Afghan guards in their towers
come down for rain, barefoot like boys
laughing and throwing their hats,
rifles slung pointed down,
hot gravel caught in a downpour
that sends up dust in waves,
bathing our feet brown.
Plastic bags snap, flapping on the wire
and half-eaten apples get left, abandoned for rain
along the sandbagged tops of the wall.
All across the city it pours.
And me in my room on my last night,
shaking out my scarves, packing my clothes,
burning down my stores of brown sugar incense.
I watch its smoke drift out my door.
Watch the men out in the compound, laughing,
as it pours, rain flying up around their feet.
In my room with the screen door ajar,
I’m letting all the mosquitoes in,
staggering wet and dusty-backed,
incense dwindling
down to ash.
Afghanistan, on my last night –
rain so hard it danced.
Last Looks
I’m sitting with my back against a building
by the runway, kicking at my kit, anti-social as hell.
The sun is burning circles into my legs. I’m waiting
to get on the plane. I’m out of here for good.
I watch a newswoman on the tarmac
talk to troops about going home, their faces smiling,
heads nodding. I look away, sad
that I can’t quite get there.
Still dwelling on suicide bombers and perfect paper sky,
this fight, both winnable and un-won,
the silence of mountains in the distance
plummeting, indivisible.
This morning the plane sits ready out on the runway,
its shadow rippling in the heat, its ramp folded down.
We head off towards it in single file.
My lungs go in and out like a last look.
I try to breathe it all in – all these hard things –
this detached ache like a paper kite on a cut string.
I can’t figure out what it is I’ve lost.
Horizon Pool
Lounging poolside in Dubai on our way home,
I watch soldiers swim
ming, sun burnt and laughing
holding beer above their heads as they wade through the water.
They make jokes and the talk is mostly of tattoos or booze –
those nothing-to-lose conversations.
It’s only later in the afternoon, when everyone is undone
by heat and the smell of chlorine evaporating on concrete
that guys on their backs, sweat pearled, smelling of coconut,
stop talking smack and turn to the one time
they each though they might die.
I lie on my stomach beside them. Unrelated families
at the far end of the pool splash and play. But at our end,
we are still, listening, each to our own thoughts
as the quiet fill of water spills from here to there, falling
off the edges of infinity – from one horizon to the next.
Masham Means Evening
Grapevine fires from beyond the hills in Arghandab
fill the land with smoke. .
At sunset it comes drifting into camp,
smelling of pot.
Somewhere a coalition fire blazes, burning up
all the best hiding spots –
another offensive begins.
It’s the end of the day in Kandahar. At the call to prayer
women in blue burqas wandering late through the bazaar,
hasten behind closed doors.
Wind carries land.
The sun sets into its own ash
and a man bikes quickly home.
Beneath the guard towers
emblazoned by the last rays of the sun –
one-eyed dog in a stone filled cemetery
prowls the pebbled mound of each new grave,
each one a tiny esker. The dog keeps vigil
beside the bombed out wreckage of an abandoned tank
inclined to a bed of rocks burned purple,
sits hunched on the ridgeline and watches birds circle
off the southern edge of the world.
He sleeps when night falls – one-eyed among the dead
and the stars described in arcs above our heads
too heavy to hold.
This is Masham.
Masham means evening.
Acknowledgements