Morning’s old news from another time zone.
Another video, last night’s big-eyed child
cradled by a weary soldier or firefighter
across battle lines and a shifting border.
Off the walkway to step around the water
where the shopkeeper is hosing the concrete,
the aspirate knocking of the stream, shaped
by contained pressure, ups the ante because
I have bet on consciousness to be awake
even as the sales of armament overtake
the shopkeeper and the street vendor, reduced
to cleaning the neighborhood underneath
the saw-sound of engines above the cloud cover.
Yes, it all goes together, it is messy. The story
of a child rescued from the destroyed city
for a better life omits the residue. I have inside me
the click of a single round squeezed off
in a sniper-scope war, and the tidal thudding
of wave after wave of bombers melting steel
and the puncturing whoosh of bunker missiles
and the painting of napalm and the spray of
cluster-bombing, which returns me between wars
to the ideal, the sublime, the transcendent,
the transformative and the aesthetic escapes
of the mind from a cracked and patched heart.
I am only seventy, think what it means to be
twenty and the sidewalk taking you past dry goods
and home appliances, past a pocket of cold
at the ice cream window, past the hissing espresso,
and at the far end the dark of the movie house
telling a story that never happened. I am my insides,
as you are, try to tell me the paycheck is bigger
than the hole in your gut where peace used to be.