Station Zed (5 page)

too-formal sound of someone

being poured through the sieve of another language.

Syllable after syllable

piling up and up until the boy,

buried to the neck,

slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his.

As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame.

There’s a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand.

Over there’s a water tower, under that’s the bore hole

and here the body asks and asks about the role

it’s asked to play: no matter how it’s dressed.

Like a nomad like a journalist like the hyena

who eats even the bones

and shits bone-white scat from the calcium.

No matter if it sleeps under a dome

of UNHCR plastic, baby blue in the sun,

or hides in a spider hole

or walks around in uniform behind plate glass,

the body makes itself known before it becomes unknown.

On the television the blade runner is facing down the skinjob,

and of the two, who is the more human?

On the table there isn’t a glass of whiskey but the ghost of whiskey

that keeps whispering,
It’s OK to be this way, nobody will know
.

And then the boy who rolls his pantlegs

up above his ankles because to let them drag along the ground

is to be unclean turns right before your eyes into a skeleton.

At KM4 a wall of leaves spits green into the air

and hangs there beautiful and repulsive.

Between the leaves, in the interstices where birds

don’t stir in sun and heat, the smell of raw camel meat

wakes you to the vision of what keeps going on in the wound—

the wound inside your head that you more or less shut out

as you go round and round the roundabout

at KM4 where your friends the soldiers in the Casspir

are all pretending to be dead.

The TV Ken doll anchor keeps complaining to their corpses,

Hey, can’t you get my flak jacket adjusted

so it doesn’t crush my collar?

Leaves softly undulating, little waves of leaves undergoing shifts

between astral blue and green, leaves always breaking on leaves

in the little breeze that the Casspir passing stirs in the heat—

stirring the memory of putting your fingers

in the wounds of a blast wall at KM4 as if you were

doubting Thomas waiting for Christ to appear:

thumb-sized holes for AK-47s,

fist-sized for twenty caliber, both fists for fifty.

Out of a mouth of bone that lives inside

the darkness in a stone like a cricket hidden

somewhere inside a dark house, the incessant stridulation

sounds like the song,
I would love to be martyred in

Allah’s Cause and then get resurrected

and then get martyred and then get resurrected

again and then get martyred
…

If your trouser legs drag on

the ground you’re sullied, you’re unclean.

Be a Fedayeen. Be a Marine. On the other side

of language where none of the concepts stick

the boy with his trousers rolled liked

what he called “the rap music”

and a t-shirt emblazoned with the word “Knicks.”

Off behind the acacias in a little oasis of galvanized shade

the soldiers sit smoking and joking,

they talk to you with shy smiles and gentle laughter,

they offer cigarettes before you can offer them,

their tact and manners are exquisite.

It’s like being at a king’s court where the thrones

are three-legged stools, where the knights before battle

go around in regulation-issue sleeveless undershirts,

where the gold and silver floor is dust packed hard by boots.

Now the wind is blowing through the trees,

the scene is changing as the day moon grows strong,

leaves hanging from the branches

drip and curdle in the afternoon sun.

The soldiers lie down on mats, their faces slacken,

sleep runs like a hand over their skinny bodies,

and a goat climbs into a huge cooking pot

and licks and licks the sides clean.

The journalist who doesn’t sleep walks into a bullet.

The young boy with trousers rolled waits at KM4.

Before them both is a door into the earth that swings back

like a cellar door in the last century.

Ahmed Abdi Ali Patrice Andy Bill Rika Zero Idil Yoko

meet in the underworld at The Greasepit Bar

and talk about rotations up to the world of the living:

they come back like Patroclos to accuse dreaming Achilles

of having forgotten and forsaken him,

faithless in death to their companions …

The sun compressed to a sliver shines through

mesh of my mosquito net that holds back

mosquitos hovering like the souls I don’t believe in

of those who’ve died or have gone missing in the wind’s

unsubtle devastatations—

but the love of lost companions

brings back wet underwear: socks, T-shirts,

boxer shorts, bras, panties, a dhoti

hung from thorn trees to dry in the dawn breeze.

Here the body is the sheered-off wing of the Trans-Avia plane

lying in a scrapheap

like the knocked-off arm of an old Grecian figurine

of Winged Victory pacing down the deck of Athenian might.

Here, you can let yourself go in so many ways—

the bomb pack strapped to your waist and detonated

by pushing Send on your cell phone.

Or the eternal aesthete in his eternal pursuit

of just the right moment to see

the splintering of light passing through tent mesh

waking you to the unambivalent hate you’ve always craved.

The rivals walk off to where the broken pediments

of the cathedral still brace under the weight of the rose window.

And the body barters for the ghosts pinned down by the shadows

to come rising at this moment from the grave

telling the body it’s too late, it’s always been too late

passing over the ocean’s dry whispering wave.

for Christopher Merrill

WHAT I HAVE TO SAY ABOUT MY TRIP MEANDERS the way the Tigris and Euphrates meander, and like those rivers in flood, is sometimes murky in intention, balked in it its conclusions, and flows where it has to flow. In Iraq, in which the customs and conventions were often operating invisibly, or easily misinterpreted to be the same as mine, I suppose I gave up on telling a straightforward story. Instead, one night in a helicopter, what I felt in the air, so different from what was happening on the ground, made me realize that when you take an oath to tell the truth, you’re not telling that truth either to the judge or to the courtroom. Perhaps the point of the oath is to try to surround yourself with a lightness and solitude from which you can speak the truth, adding whatever light and shade you can so as to make “the how” implicate “the why.” After all, the judge and the members of the court weren’t riding in the helicopter, so a realistic description won’t mean anything to anyone unless you add that light and shade which only you, as the witness, could perceive.

But even then, in the helicopter roar, the truth may be hard to hear, even in your own ears.

Again and again I kept taking a picture of the numbers

and letters on my passport for Deneyse from Texas,

just the same as me, except she was in Baghdad and I was where

I was feeling ridiculous, a real techno-fumbler,

as I downloaded and uploaded and pressed

Send over and over, trying to get the numbers

and letters to come out right: 2211 … and then a lot of blur

that was driving Deneyse crazy:
Who is this jackass

that he can’t even use a cell phone?
She was stuck where

she was stuck, in the desert in the Green Zone, and here

I was, listening to some unknown bird doing its best

to sound like a wind-up bird while the numbers

and letters got screwed up in the electronic ether—

my cell phone’s camera kept making my passport face

explode with little yellow stars, and I didn’t know where

in what universe they came from, my face like the numbers

and letters and that screeching bird devolving to this creeping sense

of senselessness making me vestigially aware of how numbers

and letters and maybe Deneyse too, despite whatever

she was trained to show as her Embassy face,

were all part of this giant abstraction branching out everywhere

just like a tree that every second keeps getting bigger

until it dwarfed me and her and the bird, dwarfed

the embassy, and my silly attempts to make the numbers

and letters more readable: and then I was aware

of my heart, I mean my real heart, the bloody muscle inside my chest,

beating a little too fast, telling me in a melodramatic way,
Beware

the Ides of March!
like the soothsayer in
Julius Caesar
.

And then no bird, no embassy, no Deneyse,

no me—there were just the pictures of letters and numbers

hanging from the tree and Baghdad was a nowhere anywhere.

I FLEW SOUTH TO BASRA IN A DASH 8, an eager little commuter plane with a fifty-seat capacity. The loadmaster—which is Embassy Air speak for the steward—wore wraparounds and a reflective orange and yellow caution vest. “File across the airstrip single file,” he told us. “Avoid the propellers, and climb the stairs into the Dash one pair of feet on the stairs at a time.” The only addition to the safety announcement was the loadmaster warning us that the plane might shoot off decoy flares, and that the explosion we would hear was the sound of the flares deploying. If a heat-seeking, infra-red guided missile was fired at the Dash, automatic sensors would release the flares, either in clusters or one by one, in the hope that the flare’s heat signature, many times hotter than the engine, would decoy the IR missile away from us and after the flare. On an earlier flight to Baghdad, Chris, my pal and fellow traveler, had experienced the release of these flares: “The explosion,” he said, “was really loud, loud enough to hurt your ears, and absolutely terrifying.”

The plane began to taxi down the runway, and Chris and I fell silent as the rattle and roar of the Dash ascending filled the cabin.

Shamash the sun god, the god of justice who lays bare

the righteous and the wicked when he floods the world

with light, came walking down

the muddy-looking Tigris

into Basra where gas flares from the refineries burning all night long

faded into the Dash 8’s prop

whirring just beyond the window.

So much gas was burning off into the air the plane

was descending through

that a skin of light kept rippling over the city’s cinderblock and rebar

tilting up at the plane’s belly swooping down.

In my book I read how the Deluge made the dykes give way:

the gods crouch like dogs with their tails between their legs,

terrified at the storm-demons they themselves let loose.

At the end of six days and nights, Utnapishtim and his wife

send out a raven that never returns.

The ark runs aground on a mountaintop just above the storm waters

that have beaten the world flat into mud and clay.

And Utnapishtim and his wife offer the gods sweet cane, myrtle, cedar,

and the gods smell the savor,

the gods smell the sweet savor,

the gods hover like flies over the sweetness.

THE PLANE LEVELED OFF AT CRUISING ALTITUDE, and through the pitted glass, I saw the Tigris winding through Baghdad, the city hazy in the morning light. As we flew south, the Euphrates and Tigris, which almost meet in Baghdad, again diverged into widely meandering beds before coming together outside of Basra in a river called the Shatt al-Arab that empties into the Persian Gulf. Field on field of green wheat and barley surrounded small isolated farmsteads nestled inside groves of date palms. Underneath us, I watched the shadow of the Dash ripple across the vast green plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. Mesopotamia means “the land between the rivers,” and here and there, you could see long, straight irrigation canals, and artificial reservoirs divided up by dykes, watering the fields. I was astonished to actually be seeing what I had known since grade school as “the cradle of civilization.” I remember reading about cuneiform writing, and thinking that it looked like the marks that a flock of crows’ feet would leave in our muddy garden if it froze solid overnight.

As we began to see the outskirts of Basra, I thought of the great Ziggurat at Ur, and how, twenty-five years ago—and a year or so before the first Gulf War broke out—I’d come across a cuneiform tablet in the Louvre, translated into French, about the destruction of Ur. I copied it out on the back of an envelope, took it home, where it sat on my desk for months while I read the odes of Horace. And then one day, I found it on my desk, and thought that if I could treat it like an Horatian ode, that I might be able to do something with it in English. So via a French translation of an ancient Akkadian original, and utilizing a meter that I’d come across in Horace, I translated a poem into English that I called “Lamentation on Ur.” I hadn’t meant the poem to have overt political overtones—I thought of it as a general comment on the destruction and fragility of civilized life: