Mothers Over Nangarhar. Pamela Hart
Читать онлайн книгу.
be the wake of that ship, impossible without it, doggedly pursuing it—a thing apart and yet integral. To live a life without poetry is to look out from the ship on which we cross the short sea of our existence and see the water unmoved, untroubled, untouched, and to think nothing of it, the sea slick and without sound. No one would ever confuse a ship with the parting water that pursues it, and yet a ship without its wake, like a wake without its ship, would be a ghost ship, a sign of death-in-life, a form of terror.
Mothers Over Nangarhar speaks back to the world while being deeply aware of its own nature in this wakeful way, aware of the strange and haunting paradox of having given life to the world that encircles it and having also been brought to life by that same world, the paradox of being in the middle of a war without being on the ground, the imagination brimming in the wake of the ship of state. The book circles its subject with the poignant uncertainty of whether it is merely observing or being dragged down into the depths. These are poems that move like liquid, pursuing what has been lost in those distanced decisions as life turned a corner and bent out of sight, that move with a foreboding sense of an approaching but unconfirmed shipwreck, having passed cindered flotsam in the sand.
The deft use of craft in Mothers Over Nangarhar, with its admirable range of influence, allusion, and form, doesn’t paper over the collection’s sense of its own ancillary and obsessive nature. At its heart this book is a story of the mother’s mind making sense of a child tossed overboard and into the jaws of war. How does the mind make sense of this—the nightmare of your child being chewed and spat out by Scylla and Charybdis and then sent back to you? How does the body make sense of this—by seeking communion with nature and art and others, or through the search for virtual knowledge?
Somewhere between theory and therapy but free of the constraints of both, Mothers Over Nangarhar moves through its mazy, crazed world of intimate and global conflict, exterior and interior pain, searching and assured. It is a beautiful, strong, and vulnerable work for our beautiful, strong, and increasingly vulnerable world.
—Rowan Ricardo Phillips
June 2017
MOTHERS OVER NANGARHAR
WAR PARTITA
Dear one
From the yard I see Mars
While you keep watch in far-off deserts
I check the world clock
Looking for the force of cluster
I recon the conflict
Secure the day’s perimeter
Tripwire my better angels
Oh you of frenzied armor
Carve this song
Into your bullet
CITIES & SIGNS & WAR
If all cities are Venice and all Venice is memory then where will you be deployed. Will you see Venice in Kabul. Their architectures spreading across arid plain and narrow canal. There you go. You may walk and walk and not notice anything real and when you do see something maybe you’ll know that thing as a sign of another thing. Here you are. Your M4 over your shoulder. Marco Polo tells Khan the streets are written pages; the city says everything. But you are reading an unruly discourse. It may have nothing or everything to do with the city of your deployment. Your face burns as it hunts. The signs are signs of other things. What do I as your mother know of this. Nothing.
RIVER OF PAINTED ROCKS
Along the Chattahoochee we walk. Men fish in its muddy shoals. Also cormorants. Pelicans sun in a river of painted rocks. I’m proud. It’s the marching. The uniform. The order. Heat oozes. Fish break the cinnamon surface. I notice your eyelashes. How dark. You were a blond baby. Now you are a soldier. You have an Adam’s apple I see. Your skin is clear. I hear my father saying your skin is clear. I talk to him for a very long time in the parking lot of the Red Barn Restaurant. It’s our last lunch. I don’t know this then. See how the mind is torn from topic to topic. We don’t visit Carson McCullers’s home. She married a soldier from Fort Benning. Its stucco houses, the red-tiled roofs. You liked to paint. You were not an artist. There’s no rushing mountain stream to this story.
WAR GAMES
In a photograph posted online plastic soldiers crouch behind switchbacks of sand and twigs. Several lie sideways in the dirt, like helpless turtles. Miniature paper flags flutter near the enemy’s berm. Elsewhere a mustard-yellow cowboy idles, his hat hanging off the back of his head as the pistol is fired. His target is decked out in headdress and chaps, rifle in one hand and bow in the other. My son’s first gun was a dinosaur.
FLYNN’S POND
My pregnant belly
your small torso
below the pond’s skin
us drifting
in an overcast day
the pond itself floating
like a ceramic boat
in the middle of the world
surfaces unmarked by breeze
or the scar of us
the water’s desire for our bodies
our want for its glassy touch
you’re safe said the pond
its blanket
coiling around our legs
TO THE PERSON WHO ASKED ABOUT NEGOTIATING DIFFERING PERSPECTIVES WITH MY SON IF THERE ARE ANY WHILE SUPPORTING HIS CHOICE
In the video he stands at the plastic yellow-and-blue easel
A big sheet of paper is covered with slashes and drips
His awkward grip on the brush
Our old dog lumbering into the scene
Dog and boy hug
Keep going I say
Cars splash through melting
snow on pavement
Drip drip goes
the gutter
Can I stop he asks
Back then I did not see how morning made us
We moved unevenly through the day
filling it with fine motor skills and bad food
I did not recognize that paint on paper
one winter afternoon
would be anything more
than what it was which was
that he didn’t finish
and the dog wandered
out of the frame
AT THE SHOOTING RANGE
Shell casings ricochet off my arm
flicker like hummingbirds
Hot from flight they snag
in the weave of my sweater
Such beautiful moltings and scatterlings
these brassy hearts
The gun’s barrel is domestic gray
like a pen in my hand
To know what you know I load
seventeen hollow-point
bullets to nest
in the chamber
I squeeze