Forever War
Because we cannot be undone
by routine violence,
because you call what we did
the forever war, because history
is a needle quilting itself
to the same thirsty bedrock
my white ancestors claimed,
there is only, in the end, the matter
of our shared complicity.
I am no better
with no finger on a trigger
than any other colonizer, and you
with your immigrant mother
and the bombs you loaded
onto Jeannie Leavitt’s plane
are only one man among many
telling the same lie: that air power
can suture the musculature of war
shut for good. Can this ever
be undone? Now drones. Now the same
Groundhog Day of special ops
humping across dry lands
most Americans could never name.
You are gone
in your plane over the Tigris
again, and here there is only Nebraska
and wind, my insufficient
hands, the dumb and bloody language
of the tongue I cannot shed.
Sucker Hole
In the afternoons, thunderheads
spooled in from the sea. You used to joke
that from your office window
on base there was nothing but framed
clear sky, blue as the deep end of a pool,
but on the flight line suddenly you were curtained
in by storms, fooled, once again, by a Florida
sucker hole. Each spring I watched dewberries
unwind in our backyard, counted wild
shiso, wood sorrel, and chickweed too. You
resurrected the gardenia bush by the pergola
with just a bit of pruning, but I could lose
any planned thing to neglect, accidentally forget
a whole garden of tomatoes and crookneck
squash, the basil gone sour at the throat
of each leaf. Still, when our backyard
offered us wild berries in a brief
window of splendor, I took them. I watched
the clouds pile against the planes over the bay,
and each day you always came home.
Limnology
Even now—older—you are a lake
at daybreak, silver, feline, cranes
breaking the sylvan foot between trees
and waterline. You are the shore’s
red mouth, mica glittering underfoot,
the bass in the depths, the reeds,
the snake in the reeds too. Between us
there is both drought and draught,
years of thirst punctured with starbursts
of plenty, so much water I can barely
bring myself to breathe. Above,
the eagles, once gone, are arcing
from their eyries, swinging low to feed.
The water holds steady. Cold springs,
bright teeth. Love, forgive
my shallows. My endless need.
The Argument
All day we were at it, not
bickering but cold, cordial, the way
you can punish without punishing,
thrush-tongued and bitter seed
of so much left unsaid, clamp-
mouthed as oysters. I remember
the time we lived by the sea.
Your parents watched the baby
as we drank cold beer in the fog
while the barges rolled in,
and, later, when the monarchs
flocked south in thick orange swells
if we stood still long enough
they stopped to drowse in our hair
as if we were tufts of milkweed,
though we could give them
nothing sweet. Those were the nights
we loved each other best,
by which I mean easily, the curtains
blowsing in, the ospreys fat
with fish, spitting bones onto the dock
through shrills of mating frogs. And now
this night, its pinched mouth
and sterile air, your shoulders not far
from where I lie burning to touch
you, even now, after all these years.
