On clear September days, white men in neckties
and gold-buttoned, navy blazers with Palestinian lamps
on their lapel pins appear on our campus, cardboard cartons
on the walk beside dress shoes; tiny, green Testaments in hand.
From a distance, I spy them and turn, unable to accept,
unable to refuse, unable to make conversation with men
who seem to have stepped out of the ’70s, when my dad
belonged to the Christian businessmen’s organization
you seem
you really
do seem
so interested
in suffering
thoughtful
and purposeful
pain sorrow
wounds
of hands
feet
and heart
on the Jew’s
flesh
nothing
could be
worse
and more redemptive
you taught
There are dreams where you feel your lungs filling.
What was I doing? you say when the blue water hits your brain
What was I doing all my life?
Have the cars come loose on the ski lift over the sharp trees a mile over the
sharp trees?
Goodbye you say to the good world in which you lived without thinking.
I in my sleep kept murmuring broken benedictions to the white walls whispering
I shall not want
Impeccable August sky, blue ice except
The splotch of incandescent sun. I’m reading,
In the bright daylight of days like today,
Nick Turse’s book, Kill Anything That Moves
(A history of the war in Vietnam),
Which, sketching napalm’s part, describes a boy,
Who made it to a napalm ward—alive—
But with his eyelids, lips, and nose burned off
By napalm, napalm made to stick, then burn
Through skin to the bone and muscle of its victims,
Of its child-victims. O Ophelia!
Look, it wasn’t always like this.
Once, we presumed we knew what
was at stake, what right was and
wrong; we imagined this had to
do with something as old-fashioned
as truth, and as durable, presuming
we all felt this separately, together.
Once, we assumed we belonged
to each other as a natural duty and
an inborn right, not thinking how
it might all go wrong, how even
something as simple as our breath
might unwittingly harm others
through the stealth of an unseeable
virus, and how our silences assent