MiPo Magazine Robert Bohm

The Locust’s Vocabularies
a Sequence
by Robert Bohm

1. I See It

across her white hair
and through the window:
a rain like we haven’t
had for months, pounding

the street while the wind
blows a paper scrap
into the air and water splashes
down from the blocked gutter above

the kitchen window. The TV
newscaster speaks
solemnly as behind him many
people turn

to the desert south
of Najaf, watching for the itinerant to come, his eyes
burning darkly like the hornet’s black markings
as he trudges forward, promising sweetmeats
even to the viper and holding

a soda can in each hand. Here
rain and there
smoke rises from

night streets. Down
an alley where the stewed chickpeas’ smell
thickens, thoughts
explode in people’s skulls and bits
of bone fly like shrapnel everywhere.
Much closer, rain batters car hoods while she
unties her white hair and shakes

her head, hair brushing
frail shoulders
more gently than one would think
possible now.

2. To Yasin Taha Hafiz

Like you, I saw her. She stood
on Kafah St. near the Fadl Mosque
not far from where the dates-seller
whispered something into
the imam’s ear. Only when she crossed

to the other side in her black coat
did I see shadows, like those cast
by ancient Babylon’s hanging gardens, under
her eyes and hear her knees creak
as she limped through a swarm

of whining flies. Maybe
in her lineage, millennia ago, a temple slave
wandered this very street, hunting
for incense to burn
so the dead rats’ stench in the cloister

wouldn’t make her puke. Today, seeing
this woman whose face
is a prophetic mural on a wall
of skin, I wanted
to tell her something but when our eyes met
she gazed at me contemptuously, as if
it was a sin to peer without permission
into Mesopotamia’s last ziggurat, her heart. You

were born here and yet she once shunned
you too and withdrew. But it’s worse now. With
bombs falling all around, she stands
motionless, stillness the only

vocabulary that counts: each vowel,
the desert growing hotter at midday; each consonant,
a once triumphant empire, dead.

3. Intersecting Angles

The joke made her sob and as she sobbed she knocked
the gin fizz off the table onto the carpet, attracting
the other guests’ attention. What,
Tom Brokaw wanted to know,
would the next move be? The camera panned
across desert sand while she screamed
at her husband, “You keep changing the reasons
you hate me! I can’t stand it!” On
her hands and knees now, she tried
to wipe up the spilled drink with
her handkerchief. Soldiers in a jeep
drove above her head toward a place she’d never visit. Her husband,
trying to ignore her, pointed
at the anchor and remarked to Glen, his friend,
“It’s impossible to tell what’ll happen next.”
People milled around and eyed each other, growing
mellower by the minute until nothing, certainly
not the weeping wife,
was left. The screen, a pictureless
deep blue now, was pretty. If anyone was there
they would have stared
at it, at least momentarily. Hours later
rainy daylight rinsed
the Bridgeport house’s windows
on a street that skirted,
a substanceless idea, past
whatever hope of meaning
once existed there. In the meantime, in the desert
south of An-Najaf, soldiers closed their eyes
against a sandstorm as it blew
beyond what they thought was real while far
to the north Jonah, whom
some of them believed once lived
in the belly of a whale, still railed
against Nineveh, telling it: repent in 40 days or else
God’s angelic hordes will slaughter you.

4. The Distraction

“It’s like Siegfried, the old
Nordic hero,” he said about
the daffodil, confusing me.
“Look how lovely and light
it is,” he smiled.
It was 1952 or ‘53
and Uncle Hal and I had just stopped tossing
the baseball back and forth
behind the Yonkers apartment building where tonight
years later
people crowd into small rooms and stare
at firefights in Basra.
One afternoon he told me, while cousin Alfred
practiced the tuba on the fire escape,
about his father’s house in a pine forest
outside Munich not far from the Isar river:
“It was built long ago with rocks
quarried by men from whose scraped knuckles oozed
the blood that now runs in our veins.”
According to my mother
years earlier in 1946 Uncle Hal bought a fake press card
so he could hang out at crime sites and stand next
to firemen when buildings burned.
He knew everything there was to know about Mickey Mantle
and showed me Korea on the map
and made me do pushups
naked in my room when he thought I wasn't obedient enough.

5. Response

“Do you wish to destroy?”
                             – S.S.

No, not the gray zone between
one number and the next
or the unexpected secrets
that bring God to his knees . . .

You’re in a room
Its north wall: the line where Arizona
ends and begins.
Behind you, the televised building in flames
both is and isn’t real.
Focused, you hear
the abandoned cliff dwellings’ silence further south.

Far away, near a coast,
I look out the window.
In the March rain a bead of water forms
on a twig tip.

The senses converge on the seen
like the planet compacting
carbon into diamond. At night
what thief cuts messages in the mind’s glass eye with it?

Centuries ago, when the Prophet’s cousin was slain, Babylon
was already gone.
And now . . .

Me, a destroyer? Don’t make me laugh.
I leave the rain alone
and obey the maple’s dictates.

If you drown in the torrent
or the tree falls on you
or the incinerated building’s sparks ignite your hair,
don’t blame me.
A writer maimed days ago by what I spied
on the road to Najaf, the home
of Ali’s tomb,
I don’t create creation, I’m enslaved by it.

6. Thirty Years Ago Today
for Leah Cutillo, 1897-1973

Rain washes the last snow
from beyond the cesspool slab.
Wool cap on, she slops through mud
toward where a month from now poppies will sprout.
Late afternoon and the temperature’s
just above freezing. Already

the rain’s turning to sleet.
The veins harden also, after
a lifetime of shots. And in the dry eyes

something like sand scrapes to and fro.
Trudging, she returns, not knowing
how in twelve days her headache

will grow horrid and then that night she’ll die
long before one poppy blossoms.
The brain tumor, like

a smart bomb with precise controls, takes her life
at that exact second when
God wants her gone. Like a city

decades later under siege, no part
of her body suffers unnecessary harm. Only
brain and heart are destroyed. The rest is left

intact, to rot freely, according to decay’s
sundry possibilities, without interference from those
who might want her to rot a different way.

7. Dawn Voice

Gradually the fading moonlight’s
replaced by daylight, although the mind can’t be sure
exactly when

the change happens, or if
the cupola, a different blue
from the sky, is
a better blue or why
the dogs bark even before

the muezzin’s call, a sound
that rouses feelings no outsider
can understand, just as
when the wind blows, flinging sand grains
at the camel’s head, only those

of us who years ago were born here
so we could rise from sleep today
will know what being here now is like and how
it feels to realize
our deaths are televised between what you need

to know about the electric drill you want
and the pretty daffodils
pictured on the box of tampons no woman can live without.

8. Mixture
for Suman

“You bring it into the world with you.”
                                    -- Ray Charles

There she was, on her ass on the sidewalk
in late-March sunlight while four cops
stood over her on H St., or thought

they did, as somewhere else she saw
the rice paddies east of the Ganpati temple
near Hindalga in Karnataka. One
cop mocked, “That was a nifty

Oscar performance, lady”
while another looked uncomfortably
away, toward a minuscule patch
of city grass where a crocus would pop up

any day now. Other officers

in perfect formation paraded toward
the crowd, pushing it back
like a bulldozer shoving the undefined debris
into a ditch of unexpected meanings. Her daughter

and her daughter’s baby, both safe
behind her, were part
but not all of why she stood up now and yelled
at the heckler, “No, you’re

the one who gets the Oscar
for pretending to have balls!” So much
erupted then: British laughter, a Muslim infant

skewered by a Hindu sword in Kanpur in’47, the scent
of pickled mangos in an open jar and the sight
of jute coils piled up in the bazaar. From there

to now, youth
to this: the bitter
and the almost-sweet. She glimpsed

a few known faces, heard an Ethiopian stranger
whisper something pleasant in her ear, then
walked forward, not sure where she was but certain
that at the end of every billy club on the street
Baghdad burned. Smoke

rose everywhere. Even
the pigeons couldn’t breathe.

9. A Poetics of the Usual

“Nice to see something not about the war.”
                                             -- R. E. J.

Under the Iraqi date palm, replace
the rocket launcher with
a billboard publicizing Oman’s beachfront forts. Or maybe
something more local should be touted: “Visit

the plain where King Nebuchadnezzar
ate wild grasses and went insane.” The bridge
from one thing to another: always
just around the corner. Here

for instance. The child’s chubby face. It’s burned. Outside
the hospital, screaming in her mother’s arms, she is
the epitome of lyrical, improvising
sounds, reinventing
music’s fundamentals. And look: the right cheek's

blistered skin, lighter than a piece of wet cellophane
stuck to a fence post at an industrial dump, peels off
more easily than falsehood
from a newscaster’s truth. Don’t
worry, though: if you’re still

tired of it all, we’ll fix your boredom yet. After
removing the kid’s hooded sweater and other garb, rub her
with ancient Babylon’s aromatic oils, then
when her screaming fades a bit

spread her legs and play
with her clit, so tiny and shy
and seductively demilitarized. It’s a tossup then
what she’ll remember best in the years ahead: the bomb

that maimed her face or how, entering
her body, you cleaved it till it quaked. War
or no war, read about it or don’t,
true lyricism starts
when the pain’s so bad the mind falls apart.

10. Message from the Man near Synak Bridge

C’mon. Over here. Don’t mind the bluebird
sitting on the branch above Omar’s
charred innuendoes on the stone walk
near where the house once was.

Look, there,
at the Rose of Sharon.

And here. Wind blows dust across the vacant veranda.
Hope never dies. From the rubble it’s still possible
to build a kingdom of lies.

Local poets flee the city.
Unknown ones arrive, bringing
the haunting lyricism
of the locust’s vocabularies.

11. I Marched with the Dead

Some wore colorful bandannas and beat
drums with their hands. A woman
with shaved head walked in front of me. At the juncture
where skull met neck, a tattooed eye
with a black bear reflected in its retina
stared at everyone. I tapped her shoulder, queried, “Who”
drew that great tattoo?” But
her answer was drowned out by people rhyming
while far away fish climbed Amazonian trees.

I looked around at known
and unknown. Darkening the hair of those near me
smoke blew here and there. Pictures of little girls
smiling idiotically were held
high above the crowd. Making odd sounds
a distant city’s minarets disintegrated, eaten
by the moon’s gluttonous light on a night
of revelry in mid afternoon. Closer
to home, we clamored at people’s windows, begging for a chance
to hacksaw open their chests and rescue their hearts’ defanged piranhas.

On the sidewalk, a marcher saw a dead pigeon. Inside
its beak, oil bubbled up
from a crack in desert rock while blackshirted men and women, wearing
cloth masks, danced in front of a pawnshop window.
“We don’t want . . !” the mob roared
as we kept marching, uselessly, like yesterday and the day before.
In the concert hall he carried with him, the pianist glimpsed
enemy mortars flaring under the cellist’s fingernails.

The unheard march. They, the living dead.
Once Rivka from Yonkers' Warburton Ave. sprinted
from the wire factory, then jumped into the river, gone forever.
Here, today, a chanter with honeyed tongue races the length
of his final sentence, then drowns in the silence at the end.

Bio Notes
Click here to read Thirteen Scraps by Robert Bohm.