Читать книгу Mothers Over Nangarhar - Pamela Hart - Страница 12
ОглавлениеCITIES & SIGNS & WAR
If all cities are Venice and all Venice is memory then where will you be deployed. Will you see Venice in Kabul. Their architectures spreading across arid plain and narrow canal. There you go. You may walk and walk and not notice anything real and when you do see something maybe you’ll know that thing as a sign of another thing. Here you are. Your M4 over your shoulder. Marco Polo tells Khan the streets are written pages; the city says everything. But you are reading an unruly discourse. It may have nothing or everything to do with the city of your deployment. Your face burns as it hunts. The signs are signs of other things. What do I as your mother know of this. Nothing.
RIVER OF PAINTED ROCKS
Along the Chattahoochee we walk. Men fish in its muddy shoals. Also cormorants. Pelicans sun in a river of painted rocks. I’m proud. It’s the marching. The uniform. The order. Heat oozes. Fish break the cinnamon surface. I notice your eyelashes. How dark. You were a blond baby. Now you are a soldier. You have an Adam’s apple I see. Your skin is clear. I hear my father saying your skin is clear. I talk to him for a very long time in the parking lot of the Red Barn Restaurant. It’s our last lunch. I don’t know this then. See how the mind is torn from topic to topic. We don’t visit Carson McCullers’s home. She married a soldier from Fort Benning. Its stucco houses, the red-tiled roofs. You liked to paint. You were not an artist. There’s no rushing mountain stream to this story.
WAR GAMES
In a photograph posted online plastic soldiers crouch behind switchbacks of sand and twigs. Several lie sideways in the dirt, like helpless turtles. Miniature paper flags flutter near the enemy’s berm. Elsewhere a mustard-yellow cowboy idles, his hat hanging off the back of his head as the pistol is fired. His target is decked out in headdress and chaps, rifle in one hand and bow in the other. My son’s first gun was a dinosaur.
FLYNN’S POND
My pregnant belly
your small torso
below the pond’s skin
us drifting
in an overcast day
the pond itself floating
like a ceramic boat
in the middle of the world
surfaces unmarked by breeze
or the scar of us
the water’s desire for our bodies
our want for its glassy touch
you’re safe said the pond
its blanket
coiling around our legs
TO THE PERSON WHO ASKED ABOUT NEGOTIATING DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES WITH MY SON IF THERE ARE ANY WHILE SUPPORTING HIS CHOICE
In the video he stands at the plastic yellow-and-blue easel
A big sheet of paper is covered with slashes and drips
His awkward grip on the brush
Our old dog lumbering into the scene
Dog and boy hug
Keep going I say
Cars splash through melting
snow on pavement
Drip drip goes
the gutter
Can I stop he asks
Back then I did not see how morning made us
We moved unevenly through the day
filling it with fine motor skills and bad food
I did not recognize that paint on paper
one winter afternoon
would be anything more
than what it was which was
that he didn’t finish
and the dog wandered
out of the frame
AT THE SHOOTING RANGE
Shell casings ricochet off my arm
flicker like hummingbirds
Hot from flight they snag
in the weave of my sweater
Such beautiful moltings and scatterlings
these brassy hearts
The gun’s barrel is domestic gray
like a pen in my hand
To know what you know I load
seventeen hollow-point
bullets to nest
in the chamber
I squeeze the trigger of the spring-loaded frame
as one shot a thousand feet
per second flies toward the target
its jolt tangling my hair
WOMEN & WAR SESTINA
We pass around Jane’s photo
In black & white a helmet
covers her soldier’s face
Somewhere in Afghanistan there’s news
We complain that we don’t know
how things are going
I worry about my son’s going
& stroke the edges of Jane’s photo
Like a charm, it shields my knowing
the specifics of his helmet
I guard against too much news
but headlines mark my face
Every war zone is a face
scarred by combat’s goings
Jane anticipates bad news
wonders if unevenness in the photo
means her soldier’s tilted helmet
is a sign of unknown knowns
Mary panics that she doesn’t know
Searches blurry images for faces
& declares history like a helmet
sings with soldiers’ going
I notice how light in Jane’s photo
slants in shadows across some news
We’re good at dodging news
