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
His ongoing exploration of political instability feels excruciatingly relevant.
It’s also about a conflict within the order of the universe.
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