night. Since his buddy
Awesome chickened out,
he wonders if the picture
in the Alte Pinakothek
would have been easier.
Now that he’s started,
where does he stop,
does he go to Coburg,
Cracow, the Cathedral
of Lucerne, Schwarzkopf
in Riga, the cloth makers
& dyers, the tomb of Archbishop
Ernest at Magdeburg, where
next? He hums a verse
from Bone Thugs-N-Harmony,
punching the air as if to break
the saint’s armor. Well,
his ex-girlfriend, Blanche,
she would know what to do,
how to calm him down
when he begins to whimper
& cut initials into his skin.
LOVE IN THE TIME OF WAR
The jawbone of an ass. A shank
braided with shark teeth. A garrote.
A shepherd’s sling. A jagged stone
that catches light & makes warriors
dance to a bull-roarer’s lamentation.
An obsidian ax. A lion-skin drum
& reed flute. A nightlong prayer
to gods stopped at the mouth of a cave.
The warrior-king summons one goddess
after another to his bloodstained pallet.
If these dear ones live inside his head
they still dress his wounds with balms
& sacred leaves, & kiss him
back to strength, back to a boy.
Gilgamesh’s Humbaba was a distant drum
pulsing among the trees, a slave to the gods,
a foreign tongue guarding the sacred cedars
down to a pale grubworm in the tower
before Babel. Invisible & otherworldly,
he was naked in the king’s heart,
& his cry turned flies into maggots
& blood reddened the singing leaves.
When Gilgamesh said Shiduri, a foreplay
of light was on the statues going to the river
between them & the blinding underworld.
She cleansed his wounds & bandaged his eyes
at the edge of reason, & made him forget
birthright, the virgins in their bridal beds.
It seems we all need something to kill
for, to seek & claim, to treasure
till it screams in elemental dark,
to argue with the gods over—
a delicacy or something forbidden—
even if it’s only the sooty tern’s egg
on Easter Island, as warriors swung ironwood clubs
to topple clans of stony monoliths.
Women danced around a canoe dripping the sap
of the island’s last great tree. For the new ruler
who found the season’s first egg, whose eyes
reflected obsidian knives & spearheads,
a maiden dressed in a garment of blossoms
waited beneath a towering statue at dusk.
Here, the old masters of Shock & Awe
huddle in the war room, talking iron,
fire & sand, alloy & nomenclature.
Their hearts lag against the bowstring
as they daydream of Odysseus’s bed.
But to shoot an arrow through the bull’s-eye
of twelve axes lined up in a row
is to sleep with one’s eyes open. Yes,
of course, there stands lovely Penelope
like a trophy, still holding the brass key
against her breast. How did the evening star
fall into that room? Lost between plot
& loot, the plucked string turns into a lyre
humming praises & curses to the unborn.
The Mameluke—slave & warrior—springs
out of dust & chance, astride his horse
at sunrise, one with its rage & gallop,
wedded to its flanks & the sound of hooves
striking clay & stone, carried into the sway
of desert grass. His double-edged saber
bloodies valleys & hills, a mirage,
till he arrives at a gate of truth in myth:
for a woman to conceive in this place & time,
she must be in the arms of a warrior riding
down through the bloody ages,
over bones of the enemy in the sand
& along the river in a sultan’s dream,
till their child is born on horseback.
Did a Byzantine general intone Ah!
when he saw a volcano shoot flames up
across hills? Is nature the master of war?
Could a fissure become a stone syringe
pluming liquid fire against an enemy? Hell
was a beauteous glow made of naphtha,
what the Babylonians called the thing
that blazes—oil seeping out of the earth.
If a woman heard the secrets of Greek fire
in a soldier’s dream, he couldn’t save her.
Only lilies dared to open their pale throats.
After a turtledove spoke on her behalf,
the executioner couldn’t believe how light
his hands were, how heavy the ax was.
My wide hips raised two warriors
from sweat & clay, blood sonata
& birth cry. I said anger & avarice,
& they called themselves Cain & Abel.
I said gold, & they opened up the earth.
I said love, & they ventured east
& west, south & north. I said evil,
& they lost themselves in reflected rivers.
After scrimmages across Asia Minor
& guarding kingly ransom in the Horn of Africa,
my sons journeyed home to peasant bread
& salt meat, to whorish doubts & wonder,
but when I flung my arms open at the threshold
they came to me as unseasoned boys.
They swarmed down over the town
& left bodies floating in the ditches
& moats. Bloated with silence,
blue with flies on the rooftops.
They gave the children candy
made of honey & nuts, scented with belladonna
to weed out the weak. Bundles of silk
rolled out like a rainbow for the women.
On the wild forgetful straw beds
they created a race, a new tongue
to sing occidental prayers & regrets.
Their camphor lanterns mastered darkness.
All the taboos of lovemaking were broken.
Soon, laughter rose again from the fields.
Now, she moves against him
like salmon trying to swim upstream
against the earth’s spin. The whole night
trembles, the oldest sobs caught
in their throats, a new skin of sweat.
For him, his trek into the deep woods
began days ago when the birds grew silent.
They now pray a son hides inside her.
But tomorrow—tomorrow, only the men
will dance ancestors alive, gazing up at Venus,
born to slay the enemy in their sleep.
The high priest has blessed the weapons,
& they cannot turn back. Not until
a thousand hooves strike the dust red.
The drummer’s hands were bloody.
The players of billowy bagpipes
marched straight into the unblinking
muzzle flash. The fife player
conjured a way to disappear
inside himself: The bullets zinged
overhead & raised dust devils
around his feet. He crossed a river.
Bloodstained reeds quivered in the dark.
He rounded a hedgerow thick with blooms
& thorns. Some lone, nameless bird
fell in tune with hi
s fife, somewhere
in the future, & he saw a blue nightgown
fall to the floor of an eye-lit room.
The matador hides the shiny sword
behind his cape & bows to the bull.
Silence kneels in the dung-scented dust.
El toro charges. The matador’s quick
two-step is perfecto, as the horns
graze his shadow. He bows again
to the minotaur. Where did the blade
come from, how did it enter the heart?
The flamenco dancer’s red skirt catches light
& falls. She adores the levity of his hands
& feet. Some beings steal sunrises
from blood. He knows where the words
come from, that line of García Lorca’s
about eating the grasses of the cemeteries?
Hand-to-hand: the two hugged each other
into a naked tussle, one riding the other’s back,
locked in a double embrace. One
forced the other to kiss the ground,
as he cursed & bit into an earlobe.
They shook beads of dew off the grass.
One worked his fingers into the black soil,
& could feel a wing easing out of his scapula.
That night, the lucky one who gripped
a stone like Mercury weighing the planet
in his palm, who knew windfall & downfall,
he fell against his sweetheart again
& again, as if holding that warrior in his arms,
& couldn’t stop himself from rising off the earth.
Two memories filled the cockpit.
The pilot fingered the samurai swords
beside him, as the plane banked & dove.
Locked in a fire-spitting tailspin,
headed toward the ship, he was one
with the metal & speed, beyond oaths
taken, nose-diving into the huddle
of sailors below, into their thunder.
The day opened like a geisha’s pearl fan.
The yellow kimono of his first & last woman
withered into a tangle of cherry blossoms
& breathy silk. A sigh leapt out of his throat.
Before he climbed up into the cockpit
he left a shadow to guard her nights.
Another column of soldiers crosses
the two rivers of flesh & idiom,
time & legacy. An echo of cries
reaches deep into the interior.
Weeks. Months. How many years
of candlepower did it take to journey
from wooden catapult to predator drone
speeding across cerulean sky like sperm?
How many ghosts hide in Liberty’s mirror,
how many are released as she strolls
along these deliberate avenues? Oh,
those broken vows & treaties that swear
the only excuse for pig iron & smallpox
is the goodness of gold in the hard earth.
Tribe. Clan. Valley & riverbank. Country. Continent. Interstellar
aborigines. Squad. Platoon. Company. Battalion. Regiment. Hive
& swarm. Colony. Legend. Laws. Ordinances. Statutes. Grid
coordinates. Maps. Longitude. Latitude. Property lines drawn
in unconsecrated dust. Sextant & compass. Ledger. Loyalty
oath. Therefore. Hereinbefore. Esprit de corps. Lock & load.
Bull’s-eye. Maggie’s drawers. Little Boy. Fat Man. Circle
in the eye. Bayonet. Skull & Bone. Them. Body count. Thou
& I. Us. Honey. Darling. Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep
again? Come closer. Yes, place your head against my chest.
The moon on a windowsill. I want to stitch up all your wounds
with kisses, but I also know that sometimes the seed is hurting
for red in the soil. Sometimes. Sometimes I hold you like Achilles’
shield, your mouth on mine, my trembling inside your heart & sex.
When our hands caress bullets & grenades,
or linger on the turrets & luminous wings
of reconnaissance planes, we leave glimpses
of ourselves on the polished hardness.
We surrender skin, hair, sweat, & fingerprints.
The assembly lines hum to our touch,
& the grinding wheels record our laments
& laughter into the bright metal.
I touch your face, your breasts, the flower
holding a world in focus. We give ourselves
to each other, letting the workday slide
away. Afterwards, lying there facing the sky,
I touch the crescent-shaped war wound. Yes,
the oldest prayer is still in my fingertips.
A curtain of fire hangs in the west.
The big gun speaks. Speaks
as if all the gods are cursing at once.
Another timber kneels in the dirt.
I sit at this blue window
entranced by Van Gogh’s night sky
burning, as beautiful insanities
skirt the worm-riddled trenches.
The slightest lull beckons GIs
to our doors. Oh, yes, the horses
I’ve broken in each lonesome body.
I’m the wave ridden beyond chance.
He falls asleep. I whisper into his ear,
& he tells me every signal & secret code.
A marine writes the name of his sweetheart,
carefully printing each letter
as if to make the dead read
the future’s blank testaments.
He straddles the fan-tailed bomb
& scribbles a note to al-Qaeda:
This is a fat prick for you sand niggers.
This is a cauldron of falling stars.
Months tick down to a naked sigh.
The marine reads again the Dear John
to bring kisses to life on smudged paper.
Her skin is now a lost map. Each page
is a bloody memory facing itself,
A bottle-nosed dolphin swims midnight water
with plastic explosives strapped to her body.
A black clock ticks in her half-lit brain.
Brighter than some water-headed boy
in a dream, she calls from the depths. The voice
of her trainer, a Navy SEAL, becomes a radio wave
guiding her to the target. One eye is asleep
& the other is the bright side of the moon.
The trainer & his wife sway to the rise & fall
of their waterbed, locked in each other’s arms.
They’re taken down into a breathless country
where Neptune wrestles the first & last siren,
to where a shadow from that other world
torpedoes along like a fat, long bullet.
Now you’re home, Johnny Boy,
holding me in your arms, I can say
my own peace. How could you lie
to yourself? Democracy & freedom
overseas, my foot. Hanging white fire
& roadside bombs. I still remember
that Saturday you kicked a vet’s tin cup
on the corner of Tenth & Avenue A.
Johnny Boy, your kisses may x-through
other names, but I haven’t forgotten the night
you were wearing your dress blues & said,
Ladies, line up for this uniform. Your hands
have almost stolen my breath, but I know
a suburban sunset could never heal your red horizon.
Tonight, the old hard work of love
has given up. I can’t unbutton promises
or sing secrets into your left ear
tuned to quivering plucked strings.
No, please. I can’t face the reflection
of metal on your skin & in your eyes,
can’t risk weav
ing new breath into war fog.
The anger of the trees is rooted in the soil.
Let me drink in your newly found river
of sighs, your way with incantations.
Let me see if I can’t string this guitar
& take down your effigy of moonlight
from the cross, the dogwood in bloom
printed on memory’s see-through cloth.
A throng of boy soldiers dance
the highlife on a dusty back road
dressed as women, lost in cocaine
happiness, firing Kalashnikovs.
The skinny dogs can smell death
in the twilit alleys. The women
& girls disappear when weaverbirds
desert the tall grandfather trees.
After fetishes are questioned, the guns
run amok. Ghosts patrol the perimeter
& night tries to mend broken rooms.
The women & girls return to the village
with a rebel army hiding inside them.
The gods climb higher into the trees.
I am Abeer Quassim Hamza al-Janabi.
I am one thousand years old.
Once, a long time ago, the Tigris
flowed through me as I gazed up at the sky.
The eyes of the soldiers made me look
at the ground. They followed me in sleep,
hungry dust-birds calling. Now, I am ash,
a bundle of the night’s jasmine blossoms
& beliefs. There’s a pain inside of me,
but I don’t know where. When soldiers
knocked on the door, our house broke
into pieces. There were a thousand dreams
inside me. They tried to burn the evidence,
but I’ll always—always be almost fifteen.
Someone’s beating a prisoner.
Someone’s counting red leaves
falling outside a clouded window
in a secret country. Someone
holds back a river, but the next rabbit jab
makes him piss on the stone floor.
The interrogator orders the man
to dig his grave with a teaspoon.
The one he loves, her name
died last night on his tongue.
To revive it, to take his mind off
the electric wire, he almost said,
There’s a parrot in a blue house
that knows the password, a woman’s name.
His name is called. A son’s lost voice
hovers near a fishing hole in August.
His name is called. A lover’s hand
disturbs a breath of summer cloth.