War
For C.K. Williams
I.
I reread the poetry of media-drunk scribes, absorbed,
as they are, with young girls gyrating and the need for status
even among orgiasts. How they claw,
struggling for cabs, cars, and bars, and the nod from Cerberus
at the door of the club, as if from him, his elicited acceptance,
could come entrée to it all, the whole nine circles of desire.
But Buddha was right, and it makes for lousy verse, the cascade
to the fallen from fulfilled. The rituals are old, and the same rachitic
claw
reaches over us all. And so, torn, we tear, primordial as the air.
II.
We live in parts. The rich ones know. Their eyes caress metals,
held tightly to the chest, played closely to the vest, thrown stingily
among the just-good-folks. You won’t find the address of their factories
at hand. "We don’t know." An igniter built in Chappaqua,
a pull-pin glazed in Maine, in India a shell. We need arms, military
muscle, American dough. Watch it blow. Skeleton, step the crack,
payback grenade, Jack in Iraq. Shrapnel tears, moist and red. There –
there (he was six) there – there (she has no hand) there – there
(his spine is torn) there-there (her head is gone).
III
A small time to be alive. A very small time to be alive, short enough
to pretend we’ve done no harm. Thanatos is a blind-man’s bluff,
an ignoramus with a stake, a what-were-we-thinking?, a mistake.
How did we not know there was really no other? How could we, eyes,
mouths and heart, arms, legs, all the same,truly, same, how could
we see anything else but we? No fire or desire, just beloved all?
Maybe as the last breath—will we know it as last?— as the last breath
goes, we---will we know any we? ---we might feel another’s dying breath
that we might know someone else’s as we know our own death.
Larissa Shmailo
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