The Breeze
for Ed Robbins
Like code for a lover’s murmurings, MIA IED blew in
on the breeze from some place other than the place
of pleasure I remember, bower too far ever
to get back to now in the alphabet war war was waging...
The language of that breeze was fluent, calming,
its coolness almost chill but hoarding July heat
that would turn the dunes to an abstract shimmer
jets from the base would penetrate, disappearing
an instant before piercing through glare, wings
tilting sunlight toward flattening ocean,
a TV on somewhere down the leafy lane shrilling
a siren the breeze altered, catching it up, softening it
to almost human keening, though for what or who
the breeze wasn’t saying: how disjunct it felt, the breeze
blowing some memory of distant pleasure mingling
with pleasure now of a body next to mine—my weirdness
of thinking, as the breeze cooled my flank, of my friend
putting on his helmet and Kevlar vest, fitting the Kevlar
with a lover’s gesture up between his legs so the family jewels
would be locked away, and hearing him joking
this was the way the middle-aged of either sex ought always
to dress to go out to the bars, this was the way what
the breeze wasn’t saying and what my friend was
by not saying it, this was the way the acronyms
MIA IED partook of the breeze’s other murky meanings—
not saying what my friend would later show me,
all of it coming together so confusedly
but as if the breeze were words the acronyms
spelled out before there were conditions to bring them
to the tongue rooting them in air, letter on letter
opening and flowering—oh come off it, fuck it, stop
all this deployment of flowers and figures
to get around what was right there on the ground,
the glistering strangeness of it lying in the sun, skull cap
blown off, thick black luxurious hair of a suicide
bomber, like a wig hung in a well-dressed window in one
of the salon-type places in an opulent mall, hair
a breeze rippled ever so slightly, first this
hair, that, lifting, subsiding, the breeze stroking forelocks
and tresses that nestled on the shoulders minutes
before my friend took the video—that breeze was blowing
across desert and ocean all the way to here, if only
in my mind thinking to join that soughing to this feeling
of naked flanks cooling after waking a few inches
away, breeze flowing in the space between
cooling that place I wanted to get back to when the poem began
but will never enter except in words the breeze does
or doesn’t understand, Missing In Action, Improvised Explosive
Device taking on the aura of words the breeze spoke
eons ago but before there was something like a war
to give them such repletion and ardor.
First
publication in Threepenny Review
Collected in Space Walk, Houghton Mifflin, March
23, 2007.