Skolfield - Battle dress: poems

BATTLE DRESS ALSO BY KAREN SKOLFIELD Frost in the Low Areas BATTLE DRESS poems KAREN SKOLFIELD W. W. Norton & Company Independent Publishers Since 1923 New York | London Copyright 2019 by Karen Skolfield All rights reserved First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110 For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact W. W.

Norton Special Sales at specialsales@wwnorton.com or 800-233-4830. Book design by JAM Design Production manager: Lauren Abbate The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Skolfield, Karen, author Title: Battle Dress : poems/Karen Skolfield Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2019] Identifiers : LCCN 2019006960 | ISBN 9781324003014 (paperback) Classification: LCC PS3619.K64 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.6dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006960 ISBN 9781324003021 (ebook) W. W.

Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110 www.wwnorton.com W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS FOR FELIX, DENNIS, WALKER CONTENTS ONE TWO THREE FOUR Perhaps with a desk between, some chaste space, the recruiter leaning forward, warm bodies on the other side. Of the teenagers present one will lie about her age, one will eat bananas to make weight, one pull herself from small-town quicksand. Lace the hands behind the head, look good in a uniform, look nonchalant.

Army doesnt take everyone, maybe you, maybe not; lose 10 pounds, no back talk, straight-spined, clear-eyed, more than anything in your sad life this matters; memorize the ranks, dont act smart, go on long runs, carry a pack, push-ups wouldnt hurt, dont get pregnant, dont wet the bed, first things they check. Dont lie, but mark no as much as you can, maybe a little more. To be added to a list or catalog, to see ones name nestled among other names, included, individual but part of, how an engine ... wont run with a part misplaced, how the lug nut informs the wheel. Takes all kinds, some love KP, some the motor pool, surveillance, fire support, supply specialist, infantry from the Latin for children. Youll learn to work together, thats how the Army is, someones got to be the firing pin, someone else the trigger. On Veterans Day, My Daughter Wishes Me
Happy Veterinarians Day The sound of explosives disrupts the species memory of migration.

Young ducks huddle at the burning ponds. Theyd fly, but where? Magnetic north a confusion in the air, tracers falling to the ground. The horses, even the battle trained, wheel in confusion. The simple whites of their eyes. My sergeant called what I did with a handgun the needless slaughter of worms. He said Skolfield, youre a crime against fishing.

Early in the morning, my daughters hair an irregular nest. The peeping of fledglings. In my hands a bowl, the silverware serrated. What springs from those hands is a bludgeon of doves. Even grafted limbs sigh when the rains come. The hands, those twin divining rods, may tremble in the presence of an old love.

Now theyre the arms of a veteran. The hair that grows from the arms a different shade. Since the transplant he writes left-handed. He waits for the hands to reveal their previous life as farmer or electrician. By a piano he pauses to see if the wrists rise to the music. If the knuckles love the baseball.

If the fist curls in anger. Before: did he drum his fingers on the desk? Was the salute quite so crisp? On its own, the pinky angles to the teacup. Its the giver of these arms speaking whenever he debones a fish or juggles. Every time a tennis ball comes down it sits in the palm for a moment, then rises again. Weight in the hand, inert as a seed waiting to unlatch, encasement before the cleaving, from asleep to awake, from attached to singular how a seed case splits and reveals such tenderness but also its power, roots cracking rock, stem shaking the earth. A seed makes itself known, prepares the earth for its own good work, changes the landscape.

Glossy, harboring within, the rounded shape sarcotesta as of the testicle which in itself means witness, embryo like no other, willing to feed upon itself, of varying size, astringency over sweetness. Without tending reverts to its wild form. In mythology, every seed a month of hell for the mother, the daughter, her daughters daughters along the generations. In every war, the same recognizable hunger. Fruit of the dead, from living to not living, also fruit of fertility, from one to many, the names of the dead ripening. How the arm extends, the palm opens, the red pulp within, the perfect arc.

What is sown cannot be called back. We say bearing fruit and it is borne. Because so many recruits threw like girls we had to be tested before moving on to live grenades, helmets chalked with P or F, or was it Y or N, was it XX which meant bad, XY which meant good, with a helmet who could tell what was being written, chalk in the hand of a man. We willed our arms to be boys, our shoulders brutal and male, we thought of torsos and hands that had beaten or punched or strangled or slapped or headlocked women that were us or looked like us and we wanted that strength. We did not want the tenderness we saw in certain men. We did not want their baby soothing, pot stirring, back rubbing, dishwashing gestures.

If they owned ride-on lawnmowers we did not want that, nor book readers, nor lovers of cats and wine and appetizers; if they had hobbies let it be catcalling, the gutting and skinning of mammals, the flaying of fish. Let dominion be shown by the men we wanted to be, let pianos be lifted, bench-press two bills, let it be football even if the QB was so often the slightest of them, let any dress shoes languish in the closet until Sundays and funerals. Make us male for this moment, the thickened thorax, the height; make it come with a temper, make us want to destroy whatever displeased, have us piss on lawns as demarcation. Whatever someone else has built, make us want to knock over. Let us say pussy, pussy, pussy and hate ourselves, let us see those who lack strength and crush them, let us beer can to the forehead, let us drink and punch our own selves and then the mirrors and the windows and whatever may reflect like a strangers or spouses or childs pinpricked eyes which are our own eyes let it be failure that drives us or the fear of it or someone who said pussy pussy pussy while lighting our boy hair on fire or unbuckling the buckle let us not ever show compassion for that boy let us take a grenade and say hell yes and play with the pin and cannot wait to violence and let us love vengeance let it be the one thing we truly love. Let us throw these grenades so far that the drill sergeant says God, seeing hand grenades thrownlike that gives me a hard-on and we who are now male will laugh at the rightness of it and we will say Me too.

From the Latin privare: to deprive, fullsleep and showers, homethoughts, othergender except that one dance stomping in bivvies and combat boots, most of us decked in Birth Control Glasses woooo those things worked. Also privus: individual, from pro: in front of, night guard, front line, outside the wire, patrol, protect, privilege, privetbut how did the word go from trimmed hedges to us when we were so rootless. Camo paint gumming up our pores, jungle palette: vineknot, humus, treetangle. Pvt. Morales painting cheekbones like Escher drawings. If viewed one way we were women; if another darkbirds winging into light.