There's a long elegy in this book called "Personal Effects"
that's for and about an uncle that
was killed in the Iran-Iraq war, who was a draftee
and whom I never met.
And had a slim album with him on the front lines,
and there are some letters that he had sent back
home that have survived also.
So that's the material that I was working
with in writing this poem.
And it's long, but I'll just read a few sections of it.
"Daily I sit with the language they've made of our language,
to neutralize the capability of low-dollar value items
like you.
You are what is referred to as a casualty.
Unclear whether from a catalytic or frontal attack.
Unclear the final time you were addressed 'thou beloved.'
It was, for us, a catastrophic event.
Just destroyed.
Died of wounds received in action.
Yes, there was early warning.
You said you were especially scared of mortar rounds.
In execution planning, they weighed
the losses, the sustainability, and budgeted for x number.
They budgeted for the phone call to your mother
and weighed that against the amount saved
in rations and your taste for cigarettes,
and the tea poured your boys, and the tea
you would have poured me approaching hello, the change
you collected in jars, jumping a bit as the family
learns to slam the home's various doors.
How could she say the things she does not know?
'A poison-tipped arrow,' she told classmates at recess.
'To the neck.'
Hollow whistle of it launched from a blowgun,
cutting the air between them.
According to most definitions, I have never been at war.
According to mine, most of my life spent there.
Anthrax in salt and pepper shakers,
patrol car windshields with crosshairs painted over them,
some badge holding my father's pocket contents up to him
and asking where the cash is from.
The war in Iraq, I read, is over now.
The last wheels gathering into themselves
as they lift off the sad tarmac.
I say, 'begin.'
I say, 'end.'
And you are to believe this is what happens.
I say, '240 times' before swallowing slime,
and you go home to mother, press a dog tag to your temple,
press a gun to that, the tag flowering into your skull.
Thank God for all-weather floor mats,
and the slope of my personal driveway, and beer cans
that change color to let me know they are cold enough.
The full-sized cab smelling of iron and Axe body spray.
In 2003, a man held a fistful of blood and brains to a PBS
camera and yelled, 'Is this the freedom they want for us?'
It was from his friend's head.
They were marching as they figured Americans do.
Between them, hardly three horsepower, and still we
shot him.
We say the war is over, but still the woman
leans across the passenger seat.
'My son, my son.'
I wasn't there.
So I can't know, can I?
His mother's bed.
A grief we don't attempt to console.
'I killed him,' she'll tell me years later.
'Fuck celestial guidance.
I killed him,' she'll say, in the midst of civil affairs.
He surprises.
He arrives, eyes taped shut, torso held together
by black thread, fridge cold.
Grief is a closed area, cluttered with his fork
against the plate and other forgotten musics.
The enlarged ID photo above her mantle
means I can know Amoo, my dear collateral damage,
as only a state or a school might do."