Sleigh - House of fact, house of ruin: poems

Graywolf Press Copyright 2018 by Tom Sleigh The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law.

If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the authors copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy. This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks. Published by Graywolf Press 250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600 Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401 All rights reserved. www.graywolfpress.org Published in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-55597-797-9 Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-987-4 2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1 First Graywolf Printing, 2018 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938019 Cover design: Kyle G.

Hunter Cover photo: NASA for Sarah, Hannah, and Rose

Basra, Baghdad, 2016 Down the side of a yellow plastic soap dish, struggling in soap muck, one of those tiny black ants that can find a crack in the invisible flees from the AK of my shadow, and looks about to spring into the unparted Red Sea of scum and froth that slimes its feelers as it rubs and rubs its body like a tarnished lamp with a genie inside waiting to pour out in a cloud of diesel-smoke from the refineries in Basra before resolving into a human shape of fire: could the ant be a sultan bewitched into the body of an ant? Is that why I hear it say, Genie, build me a palace! And in just one night, the genie builds the Green Zone, it builds what the diplomats call the anthill: two Olympic swimming pools, tennis courts, the D-Fac, barracks and offices for contractors and Marines, the gyms row on row of elliptical machines, my block of prefab trailers behind twenty-foot-high blast walls and protected by a corrugated steel roof against incoming so that its always five p.m. no matter the time of day. My sultan stares at its bewitched body like body armor it cant take off reflected in the shallow sea inside the soap dish. Above my head, crossing the craters and shell holes of a ceiling tile, a red ant rubs the lamp of its own body. First wish: to be the slingstone muttering to the wound in Goliaths forehead. Second wish: to trick the invaders into flying away on the magic carpet of an IED.

Third wish: to make the blast walls vanish so theres no Green Zone, only a Red Zone. But now my sultan staggers as if drugged, moving like a patient moves in a locked psych ward, some neurotoxin is destroying the genie inside the sultans brain, it staggers up the soap dish, balances woozily on the rim, and then falls into water, legs and feelers waving weakly until I lift it free on my finger, wondering if its going to die, and set it down on the formica where the sultan lurches and jerks along and vanishes into the crack between sink and mirror. First wish: to keep away the Annihilator. Second wish: to speak the language of the wound. Third wish: to trick the genie back into the lamp.

In the desert the lizard is the only liquid flowing under rocks and down into crevices, undulating in shadows like diffusing wisps of smoke that thin to nothingness rippling just above the sand dunes.

And just there, in heatwaves turning into air, a mirage begins to quiver: the Desert Foxs Tiger Tanks whose engines make the noises recorded from the stars, a whine oscillating underneath the motors revving, a whine only the lizard can hear. Artillery fire floating above the clouds of Benghazi, thum thum thunk walls dissolving into dust, mosques broadcasting wails of static, baffled minarets like letters of secret code, a whole codex of holiness and banalities. Is this who we are when we strip off our body armor which, as we pile it in the rack, looks more vulnerable than our nakedness? I slept in the desert and woke to lizards peering into chicken cages, the pullets with their heads hidden under wings, the chicken wire glinting from quartz and mica faintly shining upward from the dunes. The old time killers in their epic understandings had nothing on what I saw in the still, flat eyes of the lizards: they had that calm, jargonizing air of the Sergeant issuing orders and coordinates of battle: but they themselves, in their quivering alertness, could have been the arrow the scarred killer shoots through the axe-handles the arrow that comes out on the far side of time where the island, drifting, swims up through lightning, then sinks back down into ocean green: in the deeps primal war room maps unroll themselves, and there, marked in red, are the circled oil fields, the blow-torch refinery flames looking like souls in illuminated manuscripts, heatwaves entwining and rippling like two lizards chasing each other over rock, then freezing in my shadow where the male mounts the female and they stare, not at each other, but in the same direction, eyes expressionless, giving and withholding nothing.

Once I cleared the choppers wapwapwap the airstrip opened up into a treeless drift of sand where I heard a distant hammer tap against the wind and smelled scorched concrete wafting from shellholes in the runway. Just a boy who played soccer until the revolution, he learned, with a bad shoulder, to fire an AK-47, shoot off a mortar so he didnt burn his hands, talk away fear the radio broadcasting endless hero/victim chatter sent him racing behind a wall, hiding from the snipers crosshairs pinwheeling shrapnel sent him to the hospital where he suffered as much from boredom as his wound. Just a boy who played soccer until the revolution, he learned, with a bad shoulder, to fire an AK-47, shoot off a mortar so he didnt burn his hands, talk away fear the radio broadcasting endless hero/victim chatter sent him racing behind a wall, hiding from the snipers crosshairs pinwheeling shrapnel sent him to the hospital where he suffered as much from boredom as his wound.