We are bombing Libya.
On the path ahead, two robins are dancing with
each other, coquettishly, and now,
dancing with me, too. Further ahead,
a woman reprimands her son
in a language I think is Hindi.
It is the first day of spring.
It smells, though, of autumn,
burning leaves, and the air possesses
that hard, implacable quality that signals
not a beginning but a consummation.
The day is very quiet, very still. The
wind is slumbering. Packs of children
roam the streets on bike, but silently.
A woman gardens, meticulously, her
skin slowly laving. A fine glissade
of sweat. A basketball tournament is
ongoing, and we are treating it
with a measure of reverie and import
that we artificially muster anew
every few weeks. Writers, good ones,
are writing stories about the ephemeral
beauty of young, brutally graceful men
on a wooden court. Why? Because
they are paid to do so. Because
they have college loans and mortgages
and car payments and cell phone bills.
Because we are here such an unpredictably
brief while and they would like to own
a home and raise a family, because
what else is there to do?
We are bombing Libya.
Not me and you of course, fathers and sons,
mother and daughters, the collective bounty
of our memories. Not me and you, of course.
It is a pristine Sunday. We are all silent in
reverence. I am composing this poem -
If that is what we’ll call it, though it
seems bound by none of the usual regulations,
not even the lenient ones - while walking
and I am terribly afraid I will lose its remains
before I finish. So afraid that my throat
seizes and my heart races. And what happens
if I lose this poem before it is whole?
Is the world altered? We all fear how
inconsequential our suffering really is.
Later on the swallows sing a bit.
They have no reverence for days like this,
idiomorphic afternoons that exist more as myth
than tactile fact. I remember a similar day
some years ago. An old lover and I
were walking barefoot down a creek
swollen with melt water. So swollen
it seemed to be singing a rejoicing hymn.
The water was, of course, frigid, and
the two of us - mostly strangers by then,
maybe never more than that - began to
shiver. We kept going for a while, out of
some sense of purpose. Maybe if we endured
the cold things would not fail. Now,
we are bombing Libya, me and her and you.
Everyone knows memory weighs
nothing at all, certainly less than a bomb
being pulled earthward over Tripoli
by the immutable laws that bind me to you.
Somewhere, a wind chime whispers
a few plangent notes, like water that never
stops moving toward some mysterious end.