Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers Read Free Book Online Page B

no way of explaining
    what it means to be mortared, I lie
    in a courtyard eight thousand miles distant
    and remember she’s watching as she has been
    each morning since I promised not to die.
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    I open my body. She shakes out the heat
    of the kettle, watches steam rise; ascending, diffusing—
    she cannot tell and would not if she could, and remains
    in the soil in the four a.m. air beneath six rows
    of dogwoods and watches two blooms in one moment: 
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    mine, in the dust. She is driving her body
    beneath the soil of her garden
    as far as she can, not knowing I never
    took cover; ears already ringing
    yet somehow still hearing her voice
    that I held as a child saying never be afraid
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    to love everything . She, beneath
    the porch light, watches
    my body open,
    the daylight becoming equal to it.

Death, Mother and Child
    Mosul, Iraq, 2004
    Kollwitz was right. Death is an etching.
    I remember the white Opel being
    pulled through the traffic circle on the back of a wrecker,
    the woman in the driver’s seat
    so brutalized by bullets it was hard to tell her sex.
    Her left arm waved unceremoniously
    in the stifling heat and I retched,
    the hand seemingly saying, I will see
    you there . We heard a rumor that a child
    was riding in the car with her, had slipped
    to the floorboard, but had been killed as well.
    The truth has no spare mercy, see. It is this chisel
    in the woodblock. It is this black wisp
    above the music of a twice-rung bell.

Field Manual
    Think not of battles, but rather after,
    when the tremor in your right leg
    becomes a shake you cannot stop, when the burned man’s
    tendoned cheeks are locked into a scream that,
    before you sank the bullet in his brain to end it,
    had been quite loud. Think of how he still seems to scream.
    Think of not caring. Call this “relief.”
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    Think heat waves rising from the dust.
    Think days of rest, how the sergeant lays
    the .22 into your palm and says the dogs
    outside the wire have become a threat
    to good order and to discipline:
    some boys have taken them as pets, they spread
    disease, they bit a colonel preening for a TV crew.
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    Think of afternoons in T-shirt and shorts,
    the unending sun, the bite of sweat in eyes.
    Think of missing so often it becomes absurd.
    Think quick pop, yelp, then puckered fur.
    Think skinny ribs. Think smell.
    Think almost reaching grief, but
    not quite getting there.

After Leaving McGuire Veterans’ Hospital for the Last Time
    This is the last place you’ll ever think
    you know. You would be wrong of course.
    There is time enough to find
    other rooms to be reminded of,
    other windows to look out,
    chipped sills to lean against
    that rub your elbows raw. January
    is not so cold here as it is elsewhere,
    a little gift. When the wind blows it is
    its music you remember, not its chill
    as it shakes the empty branches and arrives
    wherever wind arrives. Go there then, there.
    Follow the long and slender blacktop as
    it struggles east along the banks
    through sprawling fog not destined
    to survive its movement in the morning
    toward the sea. And toward the sea
    the sound of singing ceases, silences
    beginning with a sputter and a cough
    as the driver of the truck you hitchhiked in
    pulls off, and one more cloud of dust
    in your life of clouds of dust disintegrates
    as evening settles in. What song is this?
    you remember the immigrant clinician asked,
    and now again along a shoreline in the night
    you realize your life is just a catalog
    of methods, every word of it an effort
    to stay sane. Count to ten whenever
    you begin to shake. If pain of any kind
    is felt, take whatever is around
    into your hands and squeeze, push
    your feet as far as they will go
    into the earth. Burial is likely what
    you’re after anyway. If it’s unseemly,
    these thoughts, or the fact that the last
    unstained shirt you wore was on
    a Tuesday, a week ago or more, do not
    apologize. If you’ve earned