The News. Jeffrey Brown
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while a rat watched
all. Why bother to hide?
La Saline: somewhere nearby
the assaulted salted sea.
Days later, the last light high
in the Central Plateau so far so
bone-crushed by the road (I’d
argued against going), Saut d’Eau.
They filled the benches
and told us of death upon death.
A man who’d lost his son:
“I am a bird left without
a branch to land on.”
Beirut
“This is the family tradition: my father
killed by his bodyguards, his father
killed. They chose sides, chose right
and then wrong and he who longs for
the security of death in his bed must
leave this country. My son knows this
and his will too.” Within the same frame
the eye deceives, meanings hide when
you stand outside this history. What
I’d thought was construction, a building
with views toward the sea, on the rise,
was its opposite, destruction: pockmarked,
see-through, gun-wrecked Holiday Inn,
monument against forgetting. Restaurants
filled, kebabs on the grill, and on this day
jets in Gaza, far to the south. In the south
of this city, craters from other jets
left, again, unfilled, while a billboard
touts the Party of God. Permission
required to aim the camera, granted by
Hezbollah—watching us watching them
watching them watching us, and all know
who controls these streets. Later I walk the
Corniche, in this Paris of the Middle East—
was it ever so? Two decades of war—
from Little Mountain: “We were looking
for the sea.” Look again, so close, here!
And there, can it be? The familiar choice
of chocolate or glazed, no wrong or right.
Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night.
Auden saw it in Brueghel’s Icarus:
within the same frame, tragedy plus
a girl eating ice cream, strawberry.
This is what we encounter, too: memories
that encompass craters and bombed hotels,
faces red with hate at the jets overhead.
But also the sound of the oud, the light
in the park, nervous fathers watching for falls.
Joplin
A staircase
in an open field
leading nowhere
Scenes that make no
sense—landmarks gone
street signs lifted and flung
into the next county
Trees
a gasp of breath
so grim so beautiful
Your own block
looks like no block
your own house
no longer a house
“The first thing
I picked up
in my parents’ yard
was a pendulum
then: Monopoly hotels
a bullet
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