Memories, My Life as an American, My Neighbor’s Secret
Paul Christensen
War Poetry Contest 2009 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention
MEMORIES
Sleep rots in the back of my mind;
I can't use it anymore. I lie awake
at night drifting into fantasies
in which I steer the tank around
a corner and head for home, the army
coming with me. Rifles thrown down,
helmets in a pile, the guns silenced
for the first time. I'm on empty
but the ground keeps moving backwards.
I am on the water with my oar,
a canoe for wings taking me home
to a town with wooden fences,
a corner store where the old man
still remembers me. I'm hungry
and grab a pickle from his jar,
sit at the counter drinking coffee.
At some point I introduce the girló
she enters shyly, buys a pack of gum.
One more stool to the left of me,
and she sits down. Our two faces
in the mirror, framed by Coke signs
and postcards sent from war.
She orders a ham sandwich, opens
a big purse and snaps it shut again.
The click is all I hear before I turn
to face the wall, hands at my chest.
She'll come back when I think of
something to say to her. She's
drifting with the dust, unaware.
Then there's the fire storm over
the roofs of Fallujah where my buddy dies.
He staggers toward me in one big flame
before he falls, and it's too late to save him.
I am lying there, no standing there,
crying out his name under the roar
of mortar fire. I try to pick him up
but he's a living ember, black
and burning in his bones, his melted
hands and face. I turn the other way
to swallow the street light in my window.
Sleep rots in the hollows of my head,
like damp timbers in a burned-down
house, a place of ghosts and rats
in which my photograph is found.
Marching is all I hear some times;
boots on the roof, the suck of mud
in a rainy field where the ditches
are heaped with corpses, and we walk
on them, sliding off their backs
in the blackness of early morning.
We move along the edges of a town,
behind dark shacks, a road torn up
with craters and dead jeeps.
We must keep moving or we die,
I hear the sergeant say, again for
the tenth time that evening. I see
his face in the corner of the room
looking at me exactly as we laid
him down, with his arms gone.
She sits down next to me, opens
her big purse and snaps it shut again,
like a clip shoved home in a rifle,
the kind I killed with. It makes
me grip the coffee cup to keep
from falling. Her face framed in
the mirror, bathed in that golden
light of small Texas towns, her
hair golden at the edges, dark brown.
No eyes to see, though; they're gone.
She's just another ghost I know
and doesn't speak, just keeps entering
stage right to be with me, to order
ham and white bread and let it sit.
I smoke a cigarette in the chair,
in the quiet, unmolested hours
after midnight, in the bosom of
America, where the enemy lies
hidden on the other side of earth.
I feel the smoke entering me
as I draw, the white smoke that fills
me with illumination, that tells me
stories of how I lived and almost died,
then came home in a C-5 with the coffins,
rode a bus west, got down in my boots
and cashed a check. My blue shirt
flowed around me soft as water,
and my slacks hung down around
my famished, shriveled waist.
I had more lead in me than blood,
but I am fine, don't pity me.
The sleep I need is a garden of soft
earth, and my shovel brings it up
to me to eat. I dine on all my memories
of death; I eat my friends at night,
their feet, their heads, their bullet-
riddled backs soaked with blood.
I eat them whole some times, and
when I'm full, I dig for more.
Their death is endless, and I cannot
get enough. I have whole fields
of sleep to cultivate with garlic
bulbs, with onions, carrots, peasó
I'm never tired, I work all night
with just a spoon and fork.
My dinner sits there in a lurid light
as cold as conscience, as feeble
as my hands. I stare at everything
without a judgment, without a nerve.
She enters from the left, sits down.
Opens her lovely purse, finds
the letter she was looking for,
which I'm to sign. I cannot read it
for all the blood and gore that
drains from it. The crushed bones
rattling in her purse, the bombs
in her head, and in her chest.
She moves like a battle field
toward me, night flares and chopper
wash raising my hair, blowing off
the helmet that I wore to save me.
I'm nowhere to be found, a headless
lover calling through my wounds.
She enters from the right and sits down,
the lonely distance healed by her dress.
She opens the purse and swallows
everything, until the empty world
is all that's left. She puts the bag away
and orders ham and white bread,
but merely sits as if she prayed.
But this is purgatory and we
are damned, and afternoon falls over
us like fire. I burn from head to toe
and beg for help. She enters from the left
and stops beside me, so close
I smell her soul. But she is dead.
Night drains away from me, lifting
the room toward morning light.
I hear the living stir, the cough of
cars starting in the cold, the wheezing
brakes of a school bus down the street,
stopping to pick up the night's
gleanings, the small stiff bodies
at the morgue, the ones we thought
were hiding safely, but got hit.
Who knows, they might be aiding
terrorists; a raid finds everyone guilty
in the glare of chopper lights,
bleached faces, the eyes of fear,
the limp husks we harvest
and drive to school. She enters
through the door, her feet too small
to hold her up. She climbs up on the chair
and eats her shadow, drinks my blood.
We are the heroes returned from war.
We fought the good fight, ran
with our rifles popping, cleaning
village after village in our rage.
I shouted the loudest, couldn't catch
my breath, couldn't stop my charge
up the iron stair, couldn't let the door
refuse me and bashed it in, and saw
her there, waiting for me to kill her.
I did. With joy I did it, cut her down
in a sweep of lead and fury. I saw
her where she lay, young and innocent,
about to speak. She will not speak to me.
MY LIFE AS AN AMERICAN
for E.D.
I am transparent; my soul knocks
around in me like a monkey
in a cage. They can hear it
ringing a tin cup against the bars,
as I smile to the waitress.
She doesn't care. I leave big tips.
I go out into the sunshine
and the world is not big enough.
I could stuff Asia in my pocket,
carry Europe in my left hand,
and dribble Africa around
the basketball court.
Someone get me a drink.
Make it the Pacific.
I work up a thirst reaching
for the moon. Tomorrow
the universe. I'd strike the
sun if it insulted me. In my
left hand, the galaxy, and
in my right, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Pakistan, the Peacock throne.
I juggle nations in my sleep.
Nothing is easy, but the world
is like bees in a tree hive,
and I'm the bear.
Listen, God created Eve
who birthed America.
We are the chosen few,
the sainted ones, the heroes.
We go marching where only fools
rush in. I am on the side
of the angels. Nothing
can alter my will. I am Rome
in a Cadillac, an Emperor
mowing his lawn, don't
mess with me. In the morning
I hang the sun, and in the evening,
take it down again. Stars are my
jewelry, and where I walk, the
universe comes with me,
like a dog. Doges surrender,
yes, and grand go the arcs,
but I'll be here to the end,
rising like dots on a disk of snow.
MY NEIGHBOR'S SECRET
He had the look of someone
who heard thunder at night,
in his sleep, his dreams.
Tropical thunder, the kind
that rolls forever over the tin
roofs, wakes the babies
in the dark houses, makes
the lights go on up and down
the damp, noisy corridors,
the wooden hallways of the poor.
When he woke, he was back
in Houston, ready to go to work.
The highway was full of guys
like him, gripping their steering
wheels, headed for money
and cold offices, big swivel chairs.
It was a good fit, and he ate
his meals in a soothing darkness
where the drinks were like silver.
But coming home at dusk,
eating a moody dinner with the TV
on, war in the background of
some reporter's face, her voice
as soft as her white throat,
her long painted fingernails
reaching up to point behind her
as a mortar fell with a wet thud
against the crumbling wall,
the food froze in his swallow.
He would lie down on the grass
mat, under the mosquito net,
his skinny wife brown as
ditch water beside him, and his
kids sprawled out on a dirty mattress
as the storm came up over the canal
and moved on lizard legs toward
him, a vast storm big as the universe
rolling its heavy black thunder
until the first gobbets of water
pounded like blood above him.
In his mouth, sour fish, a voice
that cracked on all the upturned
syllables, his lips splitting verbs
into hair and pebbles, as if English
had been pulled inside out
and all the raw earth of speech
turned into Arabic. He cursed
the Americans in his prayers,
and pushed his dark eyes against
the shutter, to peer into that
black mirror where terror stared.
No one knew but him. He was the only
one who went to war, who crawled
on his naked stomach over the bones
until up against the mud
of the river bank, watching the flares,
the panic of black ghosts,
rupture of night as someone fell
screaming next to him. He felt the ooze,
the sluggish way death plundered
another body, so close he could smell
the smoke of a soul, the acrid fragrance.
