The Radar Watcher

We've closed ourselves in

with the partial furniture. We listen

to arguments of an old chamber music.

From the seeds of philodendron

grow erratic arteries along the cork

behind the family photographs; their eyes

say, let the dome lamps flicker,

let them interrupt the world

of this long, speechless gazing.

Our children have left us. Our son,

this minute, watches the radar over America.

The morbid tridents he engraved in rosewood

draw some suggestion of a glow from heaven

into the blossom-shaped knots. The glow

spreads across the varnished room where he

lived like a surreptitious smile.

It's like the haunted evening light

of an autumn day, when he spoke

these words:

*

It comes from someone else,

mustn't it, this spirit, these voices

calling from without? It's like the sequence

of odd meetings, the chance repetition

of a face in a strange city, inside

the endless corridors of heat,

you wander deep into the guts

of a dead building and find a pendant

or some banal seascape in a frame,

and you hear them. You think, there waits

a triptych of mirrors, each of your faces

grieving to one another, each one speaking

its one distinct invective, but

the soft cacophony feels like a steady weight

of steam in the midst of a desolate day,

and you try to say what you are thinking,

and the voice is just someone scowling

in a window across the street, not you.

But there's more I want to tell you...

There are men who glide like snakes across

the quiet airbase floors at night.

I don't see them, but I know they search

all night in concrete tunnels for a lost necropolis.

Some nights the airbase

seems to be sinking, and I hear jayhawks plaintive

in the trees outside the fences. The men search

for the ignoble war dead in government tombs,

digging in the worm columns that support them,

while the transports bank and judge in the clouds

and descend like tentative hands to touch

the ground dislocating on our mortality.

I think of the dead coming back in ranks of lanterns

to this disinherited time, this solemn air-space

I watch under bloodshot glass, my country

a whiteness feeling for its borders in the dark . . .

and the ranks of lanterns . . .

Some day we will all be soldiers of a kind,

building fires to frighten jackals away, or seething

in caustic rains, mouthing at mudslides

rich with the rise of our dead-

either prisoners in yellow dust that scours

ridges winding through electrocuted hills,

or waiting in the blue trees like packs of eyes,

remembering our own words: the power rests

in our hands . . . the power rests. . . only a few

may survive . . . what will they do?-so we'd pray

in the blue trees, good soldiers watching

only the unfinished element upon us-

and the lanterns coming in the night. I said they were

the dead... . but no, they are those who could not die

when they should have. Pity their dishonor.

And pity the men who dig beneath the airbase, too,

for their community is love.

Pll think of them when I see the jackals

scratching at the early red horizons.

As Ill think also of the broken

buildings in the city. l'Il feel the dust

showering like sequins in my childhood's sleep,

the cloth of the Milky Way spread against

the steady universe, the headlights

of night trawlers entering a bay,

all dust, our common particles, my voice-

the voice in the window across the street.

You could gather the remains of life in those rooms,

pieces of gimlets, windbells, mirrors, and throw

a prism on the wall below that window, and say

this is the multifoliate flower of our time,

but it wouldn't be your voice you heard...

*

That was what he had to say, the last

he had to say. Now we breathe as rosewood

breathes beneath the lamp's pressed veneer,

while a mustiness penetrates us,

and the music passes memory irresolutely

mind to mind in layers of a common moment:

the same strange faces on the walls.

We watch his face going grey

among the furniture and think of soldiers sleeping

in the snow, and strands of smoke twisting up

like tired birds into the blue skies over America,

our window closed to the next, and no other voice

feeling its way in the whiteness between,

while he watches for something wrong,