You don’t write back
I write, but you don’t
write back, and I’m
not sure if my letters
never reach you, or
if you’ve just given up
on me coming back
from this war.
I dream of you, of
your skin, I walk you:
your skin, miles of it,
trenched and gouged,
and in my dreams,
I find you in every
red stream filling
up every trench,
in every muddy
gorge that fills up
my boots between
where I am and
where you are.
And then I wake
and you are not
here with me:
but I would never wish
you here with me
You are not here with me
and without you
I don’t think I can
find my way back home.
– Gabriel Gadfly, “Unanswered Letters” from Bone Fragments
The first time I visited The Wall, the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, I was overwhelmed by the power of all those names, each name a life lost. But each name also a life honored and remembered. I think that’s one impulse of poetry: to name what passes, trying to hold it in our hearts a little longer.
The opening line of “November 11” came into my head on Veterans Day in 2004 complete with that grandiose “O” and exclamation point. I was driving to the gym, thinking what I have often thought: “Wow, it’s all creation and destruction at the same time, every moment.” As I was working on the poem and started naming, I found I didn’t want to stop. I wanted to fix those people in memory. But I soon saw what an impossible task that was; there were — are — too many dead. That’s partly what the poem is about. The rain is for me the astonishing dailiness of all this death, so much of it from war and violence.
I used some Iraqi women’s names because that’s what I thought about, the women there who were dying and losing their loved ones. And the four American soldiers were listed in the San Francisco Chronicle that day, part of the ongoing body count. The exclamation points are meant to be both sincere and ironic, just as the rain becomes both the beauty of being alive and the continuation of all of our forms of ignorance.
O everyone’s dead and the rain today is marvelous!
I drive to the gym, the streets are slick,
everyone’s using their wipers, people are walking
with their shoulders hunched, wearing hoods
or holding up umbrellas, of course, of course,
it’s all to be expected — fantastic!
My mother’s friend Annie, her funeral’s today!
The writer Iris Chang, she just shot herself!
And Arafat, he’s dead, too! The doctors refuse
to say what killed him, his wife is fighting
with the Palestinians over his millions, the parking lot
of the gym is filled with muddy puddles!
I run 4.3 m.p.h. on the treadmill, and they’re dead
in Baghdad and Fallujah, Mosul and Samarra and Latifiya —
Nadia and Surayah, Nahla and Hoda and Noor,
their husbands and cousins and brothers —
dead in their own neighborhoods! Imagine!
Marine Staff Sgt. David G. Ries, 29, Clark, WA.: killed!
Army Spc. Quoc Binh Tran, 26, Mission Viejo, CA: killed,
Army Spc. Bryan L. Freeman, 31, Lumberton, NJ — same deal!
Marine Lance Cpl. Jeffrey Larn, 22, NY, you guessed it!
O I could go on and on, for as long as I live!
In Africa, too, they’ve been starved and macheted!
The morning paper said the Serbs apologized
for Srebrenica, 7,800 Muslims murdered in 1995,
I know it’s old news, but hey, they’re still dead!
I almost forgot my neighbor’s niece, 16 and puking in
Kaiser Emergency, the cause a big mystery
until the autopsy — toxic shock syndrome,
of all things — I thought that was history, too,
but I guess girls are still dying; who knew! I run
for two miles, my knees hurt, and my shins,
I step off and stretch for a bit, I go back outside
into the rain, it feels chilly and good, it goes on
all day, unending and glorious, falling and filling
the roof-gutters, flooding the low-lying roads.
I drive toward distant clouds and my mother’s dying.
The quickened sky is mercury, it slithers
across the horizon. Against that liquid silence,
a V of birds crosses-sudden and silver.
They tilt, becoming white light as they turn, glitter
like shooting stars arcing slow motion out of the abyss,
not falling.
Now they look like chips of flint,
the arrow broken.
I think, This isn’t myth-
they are not signs, not souls.
Reaching blue
again, they’re ordinary ducks or maybe
Canada geese. Veering away they shoot
into the west, too far for my eyes, aching
as they do.
Never mind what I said
before. Those birds took my breath. I knew what it meant.
We are discussing the roots of things. How phobia
means fear of, and we make them up. Bookaphobia.
Classroomaphobia. Girlaphobia. I say there will be
a quiz. They laugh. It is evening in a small room
in Queens where the desks are miniatures
of the things they should be and the children
sitting in them too close to me and my coffee
so soon done. Then I ask them if they are afraid.
Then I ask them of what. The word penis. Spiders.
The people who hate me for my name. How a moment
turning stills to a moment stilled. How silence,
even in silence, breathes. Their pages of homework
loiter upon their desks. Fifteen words they had
never seen before, and fifteen meanings, written out
beside. Benevolent. Ailurophile. I spoke, upon the hearing,
of opposites, to think of words as people, rooted,
experimenting with different prefixes. To think of words
as lovers, hungry for what it might be they want.
What is her name? It lingers a moment before
it hassles its way out of my mouth. The shape it takes,
unfamiliar, awkward. A word I have never spoken before.
And her skin brown. How she taught me the way
to count to ten in Arabic. The people who hate me
for my name. The people who hate me. The people.
Across an ocean, a man kneeling does not see the hand
that holds the gun that fires the bullet that splits
his head in two. Across an ocean, someone laughs
at a fence of severed heads. I do not know
what to teach anymore. Graphophobia. Philophobia.
Fear of writing, fear of love. And all these children
who do not have a name for their sorrow. At night,
in bed, I turn her name for the hundredth time
and find its beauty. The soft grace of wanting
to be held. A child, scared, moving in dark
from room to room to find the mother who named her,
the father, too, and their reasons why.
I do not like my state of mind;
I’m bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn’s recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I’m disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I’d be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of me…
I’m due to fall in love again.
Words ... for the Time Being 