Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting (5 page)

An Alternate History of the Destruction of Dresden by Fire

“Them that dwell carelessly, rejoice!” the headline said.
    Saying not that

the deaf child lived, but died a moment after seeing the planes' stark gleam.

  

The bombers' bombs fell past the gunners in their balls, as each tallied his

mission and each thought was released once fell. Below in Dresden it was cold

  

and the breath of the citizens and the breath of zoo animals stirred skyward

like steam rising in cadence from this strange menagerie that breathed.

  

Even the deaf child thought he felt the thunder of a hum and stood, signing

to the zookeeper, signing to his parents
“Was ist das?”
as they turned west

  

and watched the sky fill up with bright, metallic, February reflections

of the sun off planes. Past the Elbe the sky filled with a thousand tired

  

boys from Richmond, boys from Birmingham, from Detroit and York,

holding their breath as the flak exploded all around and they waited

  

to die. Seconds below, the deaf child smiled and turned to a brown bear

pacing through the new mute snow and said
“Bar, ich höre!”

  

before he seared through the sound of Dresden burning

and a cub was born crying: toothless, blind and bald.

Portugal

When my mother spoke she gave

me consciousness. The black sight of

  

cormorants nesting in rocks, sea-beat

and flowering out of green water,

  

knees me to earth. Thus was I taught

to pray—root your knees in the earth.

  

Between clasped fingers I see the sun

fall into the Atlantic and am afraid.

  

Red, like a wound bled into water,

mixes with my mother's voice,

  

Não há bela sem senão. I am told

those words were first to reach my ears

  

but mine was a murdering birth.
When I look

into the ocean I am afraid. When I turn

  

to my mother's grave, a hole in the dirt

beneath cork oak and wheat, I am afraid

  

because the edge of a peninsula is a great mass

of earth—so much to put my mother in,

so much with which to cover her.

Advice to Be Taken Just Before the Sun Goes Supernova

Take three buses anywhere.

Ignore the location of each transfer.

Be prepared to exit any one of them

at random. Everyone is where they are

by accident; they will likely be as scared

as you are. Try to have your thoughts by chance.

Remember the encrypted book by Bacon

that you heard of once, how its

calfskin pages held a perfect drawing

of cells at magnification and three nudes

dancing in a ring around the edges

of the page. No one's ever going to read it.

Step out onto the dirty skin

of town again. Think of how each city

that you've been in seems the same.

There, a building tilted to appease

the ego of an old unnoticed architect.

Here, a man, you, turning to look

at trash collecting in the intersections.

Nothing changes. Each way you look

there is a toll, within each booth

a man sits behind a curtain, behind

each window you are reflected

in an oddly overlapping way,

you find a tunnel and shout to hear

the sound of your voice echo off its echo

as if to verify that you are more than just

another piece of sacking added to the swirl

of forgotten objects swinging round

a million little masses we can't see;

but you are not, and I promise

someone will love you anyway.

A Lamp in the Place of the Sun

A complete picture of the universe

as it currently exists

is not impossible,

only difficult. The warmth

of any kind of light

is just an effigy of history,

each star the record of

a million, million cities

waiting to be burned

and lived in once again.

And farther into all

our darkened rooms

we go, as though in them

we might remember

something: where it was

we left the house key,

who it was that slept

in the small ocean of our bed,

and why we loved

their sleeping, why the door

seems different now

and unafraid

of being opened.

How long I waited

for the end of winter.

How quickly I forgot

the cold when it was over.

Grace Note

It's time to take a break from all that now.

No use the artifacts

from which I've built the buried outline of a life,

no use the broken breath

which I recall from time to time

still rattles in my chest. Yes, we're due:

a break from everything, from use,

from breath, from artifacts, from life,

from death, from every unmoored memory

I've wasted all those hours upon

hoping someday something will make sense:

the old man underneath the corrugated plastic

awning of the porch, drunk and slightly

slipping off into the granite hills

of southeast Connecticut already, the hills sheaved off

and him sheaved off and saying

(in reply to what?) “Boy, that weren't nothing

but true facts about the world.”

That was it. The thing I can't recall

was what I had been waiting for.

It likely won't come back again.

And I know better than to hope,

but one might wait

and pay attention

and rest awhile,

for we are more than figuring the odds.

Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Powers
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group

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First ebook edition: April 2014

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The following poems were originally published (some in slightly differently form) in the following publications:

“Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting” in
 Poetry Magazine,
 2009
“While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians” in 
Cream City Review, 
2009
“Separation” in 
The New York Quarterly,
 Issue 66, 2010
“Great Plain” and “Field Manual” in 
The Sun,
 2010
“Cumberland Gap,” “Songs in Planck Time,” “The Torch and Pitchfork Blues,” and “The Abhorrence of Coincidence” in 
diode,
 2011
“Death, Mother and Child” and “After Leaving McGuire Veterans' Hospital for the Last Time” in 
Hayden's Ferry Review,
 2012
“The Locks of the James” in 
Huck,
 2013

ISBN 
978-0-316-40106-7

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