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XXV.
The river will bear it away,
lock jaws at the waterwheel, change
the face of the landscape, darken
its skin, uproot gardens that hang
on its flood plain, drown books floating
water-logged: jetsam on turbulent
contour lines turning around those who tread
above layers a geologist
could identify, silt of ages, oil
pressed in refinement, burned from all those years
at the bottom like a class speaking
in tongues of fire experts can’t understand,
though they agree the temperature
is rising globally. We’re desperate
for old incantations that protect
us from headaches. Leave now; go north:
women who die barren, men who fight
to master strength their fathers lack,
the heartache of consummating only
love circumstance allows. Go South:
demons that steal into chambers, snatch
our children, teach them idolatry. Go East:
those who plant bombs underneath our cars,
call with threats, bring locusts, spread plague,
arm our enemies. In the West retreats
the sun, an ailing economy, choked
on the throat bone of consumption.
Let the current bear it away,
carry it awry, bury it. Let it
be done by us who make the dams.
XXVI.
A bund is built from “weighty material,
refuse,” reed bundles, rocks laid piece
across a river. A bund diverts
water into ditches to irrigate
sorghum, rice, hard wheat; soaks bi-level
gardens, channels kellecks to warehouse:
cities grow this way. Chesney reports
Cyrus built a bund for the siege
of Babylon with “thirty thousand men
and the hordes that followed Asiatic
armies.” They attacked through a dry bed
during the festival when servants don
their masters’ robes, one hour after Daniel
read writing on the wall, two thousand
five hundred forty years before we bombed
Baghdad on television. The body
politic “numbered, weighed and divided
by gods of wood and stone, iron and bronze,
gold and silver.” See it shudder,
a mind for each state, canals dug
in its face, mirages for eyes,
midsection of citadels, oil instead
of blood, heart of desert, husband
to commerce—excavation site.
Look at mounds that stud the plains where Cyrus
stood. Archaeologists call them tells.
First they strike a datum rod, grid the site
cruciform from that spot, point
of departure, arbitrary and fixed.
They remove artifacts surgically.
XXVII.
Bombs drop from the bellies of planes
onto coordinates imaginary
as Mandeville’s map. Destruction
renders them incarnate, delivers
pictures where women mouth their grief
over the awful angles of bodies
before deposition. Beauty
renders their pain perfect, turns it to stone.
Power needs fieldwork around its interests,
made real and sovereign. If the Baghdad
museum were damaged, the Iraqis
could sift through the rubble to prepare
their case, lay bomb parts on a table
for the press to photograph. The camera
owns the image, distributed
among all that circuitry. Monument,
document, sentence. The sun occasionally
splinters through sky clouded by oil fires.
The effect is transient. There’s
no assemblage of artifacts
whole: the day’s lit just long enough
to memorize details, categorize
them, at night invent the grammar
that rules their breaking apart. So it is
the ruptures we study, apertures
light closes, faults in foundations
that hold the weight of the walls
between inside and out—somehow
their dark traces can be read back
here to an “I” more symbol than sign.
XXVIII.
If the space behind the eyes is desert,
there must be a garden it never was
or will grow into. The space in front
naturally mirrors the desire
to change locations without moving.
History retreats from the difference
in this minimal pair. Memory
confuses them, lights the land unfolding
as a film projected from the past.
This figure proposes two ways out:
describe the intrigues of production
and uncover stagecraft as far
as the eye can see, or change the subject
and find yourself, like Lawrence or Burton,
cross-dressing to get inside Mecca.
Particulars may speak autonomously
but our habit is to borrow
words from other languages, ignoring
the syntax in which they lie. The landscapes
reemerge as doubt the idea of order
won’t quell without abstraction,
reflection, opposition, cardinal
errors that fail feeling but allow
speech, the discourse of Marcia’s family.
I’ll put them to bed in a house
surrounded by greenery. The place
is vaguely familiar, lends meaning
to return, four directions, five gates.
I take from Arabian script a digit,
“zero,” the practical nothing.
XXIX.
“I have never returned to the ‘Iraq’
without returning to Babylon.” She
cancels a vacation to England fearing
doctors would forbid the descent back
to the Middle East. “The keynote
is romance.” O, she’s in repose
there, “flat-chested,” “daughter of the Arabs,”
“Diana of the desert,” “her body
broken by the energy of her soul.”
She stands alone at a railway station,
“a leaf blown away by a breath,” a name,
room in the museum, brass plaque,
eulogy. She watches Russian
dancers during her last royal dinner,
overdoses on barbiturates ten
days later. Suicide? Were irony
not distance without risk, I’d mention she
couldn’t stack books without writing a letter,
but left no note to tell us if it’s so.
“How they leapt with grace in that cool ballroom.
We felt so civilized.” She was dead
when the description arrived home. King George
sent condolences written in first
person plural. King Feisal sent
representatives. Twenty-two years later
his last reigning descendent was
murdered by revolutionaries, died,
like Bell, “in harness.” Now she’s dust
stirring in the sirocco, “that’s the trouble
with wandering, it has no end.”
XXX.
Outside the window I hear strains
of spring woodwinds could narrate, shivering,
voiced, coincidence repeated
annually in the Midwest. Words drop
their stone, praise weather corresponding,
finally, to the field hope clears
for itself in days darkness claims: respite,
not resolution. Listen to children
shout outside! It makes sense to return here,
the call season laws indifferently.
Someone dies on the steppe. We answer
with mimicry. Rise and descend.
Fear conserves the rite in artifice,
material, and the plots to gain
and bury it. A woman yields
in the garden. We look elsewhere
when work exhausts our interest, Man
tells stories to himself walk away beneath
the masonry sky. It rains. We grow
larger than life. Someone dies in the desert.
The home is scaffolding. We dwell there,
a construction taken apart
as it was put together, inside
a map drawing geography
in exact measure, with warrants
of direction, reference and burden, in a city
negotiated by their intersections.
Two choices: stay in that ruined place
and build. Or read the desire to stay
as a sign. Time to leave.
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