The Last Battle

"So," said Peter, "night falls on Narnia. What, Lucy! You're not crying?"
"Don't try to stop me, Peter," said Lucy, "I am sure Aslan would not. I am sure it is not wrong to mourn for Narnia. Think of all that is dead and frozen behind that door."

C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle



I.
The earth split like a fallen man's skull,
and the burning skies painted every river red.
Everything ended. Stars crashed to the earth
and lay in the grass smoldering,
weeping, mourning their extinguished children.

II.
Embers. Dawn. A door in the air.
We are all blood and dirt. Through the gate,
only silence. If it is teeth and ice
it cannot be worse than this day.
I step through.




photograph by flickr user la fata matta

The Anniversary

Bombs don’t break the sky on foggy days.
Only from sherbet sunrises, azure lakes will this
Growing death emerge,
Screaming with the air it swallows.

We are nearly dressed for dinner
When the words smash through the cement
Of your lips. The sweet summer grass
Is its own shadow, black and crumbling

As your clammy hand gropes
for my voice.



photograph by Alisa Resnik

The Execution of Mata Hari

from the lost diary of Captain Jean Lautrec

As the Times tells it she died
in a crisp white suit as the sun rose.
In the questions that came after, we were not asked
what became of it, whether we cast lots for her blouse
at the feet of her corpse. We were not asked
if we sold it to well-endowed eccentrics,
or if the new light in her flashing eyes
led us to fold it in a pocket.
And when the shift ended, did we transfer it
(still warm) to a box of letters
and money and perfumed handkerchiefs? Nobody asked.

April 21, 1918: Kaputt (Finished)

after Manfried von Richthofen, The Red Baron

It is my love for the earth
That lifts these wings, it is
Your faces so far below
Like scallop shells
On the ocean floor
That buoy me.

It is the bright bead
Of a city in the night
That draws me in, the stored warmth
Of your stone walls that guides my hand.
Miles away my elderly housekeeper
Has finished sweeping the front steps
And she sinks, one hand
On her cooling brow.

The cradle of this sky
Is alive now, with silver reports
From below, tiny messages from the fires
Of night-blind, squinting men.

And now I do as my heart
Commands me, give in
To this pull: of man,
Of earth, of eternity.



The current thinking among historians is that the reason the Red Baron (1892-1918) flew so erratically and irresponsibly during his final battle was brain damage from a recent blow to the head. The brain damage is presumed to have caused his lack of judgment and target fixation. The last word he spoke before he died was kaputt, or "finished."

Valentines, After

(read "Valentines" first.)

I finished the whole thing
in one sitting, leaning forward
against the comforter, one knee
to my dreaming husband. There were

barns, little barns, and picture after picture
of the same spotted dog. I was not
enchanted. I did not see the art
of an empty heart-
shaped box.

And then it was done, a few
pages of acknowledgments and things,
and the back cover. The red foil
heart on the front had lost
its shine in the night.
The book was smaller, suddenly,
and my hands felt gritty with sand
and bandages
that were neither here
nor in Valentine,
Nebraska.

I wept.




photograph by DeviantArt user Sinse.

Valentines

The library did not have the book I needed.
“I’d better mark it missing,” said the limping man,
returning with me
to the reference desk. “It hasn’t been seen
in seven years.”

The radio news is noise in the car. I wonder
where my book is living, on whose
dusty shelf, if the thief even knows she has
what should be mine.

I park across the street from my house, still
muttering about the wasted trip.
The man on the radio strikes a sudden somber tone.
“The Air Force says now that all four men aboard
a bomber that exploded
over Qatar today”
—he pauses—
“are safely on the ground.” I exhale,
having held my breath for these
invisible soldiers,
the men I did not know existed.

On my way out of the library
I passed a Poetry Month table, the volumes
tipped on one end to showcase their slenderness.
The pages flipped fast
and my answers were not inside.
Lying flat on one end of the display,
an afterthought, a push
of a bored finger, Ted Kooser’s Valentines.
I bring it home.

In front of my neighbor’s house I pull
the Kooser from the car and slam the door.
The street is silent and I realize
the imaginary bomber passengers landed safely—
landed safely, only to return
to the incessant emergency
of war.
I realize that even as the NPR man informed me
of my own relief
they rose from their stretchers
and prepared to die all over again.

The library book, glassy in its plastic jacket,
Slips from my fingers
and lands on the wet road.
In that deafened moment my eyes know only
Black street, white book,
red heart.