French Collaborator, Soldiers
Christopher Buehlman
War Poetry Contest 2005 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention
FRENCH COLLABORATOR
Call me Genevieve,
but don't ask me what comes next.
Oh, I'm not going to jump into the river
or take holy orders, or marry
one of those pie-faced Americans
who piss cigarettes and chocolate.
I'll never retrieve my job
on the boulevard Saint-Michel
where the vases have begun to sprout
lavender again,
nor will I have a child,
launch a boy in knee socks
to kick balls in the streets,
frightening pigeons
until someone measures him
and weighs him and shows him
what his country actually wants;
to help him blow his pretty legs off.
A girl would be worse of course,
one day walking on the other side of town
with her mother's sideways eyes
and an abortionist's address
in her coat pocket.
He wasn't even handsome, really.
Just sure.
I see him naked in my kitchen, drinking wine
from Bergerac, wearing a halo of newspapers.
When he left he did not ask me to come
because he knew with what gladness
the bombers were dismantling his city.
When my neighbors had my head shaved
to show everyone who I was,
the barber's hand shook
because he knew what I did,
what would have happened to Paris
if the Germans had not loved it.
SOLDIERS
Enough of your lily of the valley
and the gardenia bush wants water.
Women have yawned truculently by poolside
while bland crops grow, women have reproduced
little bent arms and little bent legs until I am sick
of this flotilla of carriages, the smell of breast milk
stewing in the malls.
Women mint these coins for spending.
Walls are for breaking, roofs are for letting rain in,
and we all know fire wants wood.
It is almost summer. We men walk like dogs,
we walk with our shirts off in the streets.
Yesterday I crossed the bridge with a bottle of wine
in each hand; tomorrow my same lover will return
with the same smells in her hair, ready to disgorge
the entrails of books, knitting her brow
with the names of children.
Every time a train leaves, I am aware of my vacant seat
the way a child finds with his tongue the hole
where the tooth was. Bust my jar of baby teeth
and bury them in the garden. Crop my head.
The board aches for the nail, the nail aches for the board,
out where the cinders float down over the drugged fields
and nobody sleeps. It, too, is sexual.
