Suicide’s a fop of perfume, a simpering pansy,
a sensitivity that nags and tunnels
bereft of any anchor in the day-to-day,
benign but stump, a fancy man who’s
much too slick for his own good.
But murder.… Murder’s muscular, buff
in clothes or out, a rude of sweat, a lavish
of war, blood’s rush-and-flood that
seethes in the margins—a frontier town—
where opposites attract and merge:
a marriage—rhetoric’s paragon—or fetish.
And the victim? Voyeur or serial killer. Martyr
or brute. Vain and vile. Regardless,
the telephone trills and trills early morning
to late night. The stereo’s mute. Questions
knock at midnight, again at noon. The puppy
notices, barks once, then resumes licking
her privates, but no one else’s any the wiser.
i. The Wounded
A pastel daybreak: A calf
lows, embellishing the sky
snagged by the mountain
range’s silhouette.
Even from here—where
fatigue is a diagram
sketched in sand,
where night scopes zero-in
on nothing, on something,
on nothing again—radar stutters.
“Grit your teeth,” he said,
applying pressure, and then:
hardly any blood at all
but confession and blasphemy
all over the place.
ii. The Bereaved
A seance of wind
puzzles the troops, as does
the candelabra of stars.
In the slipknot quiet, they
translate the gibberish
into an anthem.
In night's noose, they string
stars together
like points of interest
on a tourist’s map.
What’s familiar chafes like a rash.
Like a rash, what’s alien
gets under their skin.
All’s a standby. All’s a standstill.
iii. The Avenger
Rumors careen like drunks
across dunes, plunge
like suicides off peaks. At midnight,
sabbath is a
tongue-twister in the mouth
of a lunatic
hold up in a terrain
populated by spooks who eat
and shave in the scope’s
crucifying circumference. Draw
your bead, they—gobbling
their stew, nicking
their dimples—imagine
a voice in the sniper’s earplug says.
iv. The Redeemer
An uppity draftee trigger-happy
behind crosshairs dreams a showdown
in his binoculars at high noon.
What melodramas his sweat
drips into his squinting eye. What a fuss
his ears make of the banter between
explosions distant and near.
Overhead, bombers slice cumulus.
Overhead, choppers whisk the sun.
Nothing disturbs the blue
of his stinging eye.
The sun rises through a skim of clouds
the way a Goth boy raises
a martini glass off a sticky bar top
to his mouth. The sun sets the way that same
Goth boy, his brow sweat-spangled,
draws the martini glass from his lips and sits
it back on the sticky bar, black lipstick
parentheses on its rim.
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