by Kevin Powers
the whole lot of it had been abandoned, more or less.
A few bums hadn’t gotten the message
that the civic venture was a failure, one or two
unremarkable concerts had occurred, a couple of yuppies
were still rumored to be living, all alone, in the penthouse
apartment of a renovated tobacco warehouse, there was
a stink about a parking lot that had been laid
over a slave burial ground. Nevertheless,
the sun was bright in the sky and the bums
dangled their fingertips in the canal’s green water,
and apparently some landlord was still paying
to have the grass kept green and mowed.
My father had been buried not far
from there. No one sang at his wake.
The absence seemed improper, deep in misery or not,
like it was just as well for us to see song
buried with him. I passed the statue
of Christopher Newport as I left, as I had
that day with my father. I can’t recall
feeling any different, though I probably did,
having learned in the intervening period that besides
being an accidental founder of this city, he was also
a pirate and a murderer of indigenous peoples.
If I’m honest, I don’t think I cared.
If I’m honest, mine is the only history
that really interests me, which is unfortunate,
because I am not alone.
Church Hill
Watch how the drivers on the hill
make a blinking semaphore
of hazard lights, car horns and the idle
movement of their engines,
and pause beside the church
that gave the hill its name,
from which you once could see
the river and a city built
at a bend which reminded
some back then of another
on the Thames. So much
is made of likenesses.
Now a parade of candles held aloft are cupped
with a reverence for the melted wax
as the candles disappear to nubs.
There is an earnestness of being there
that I can’t understand.
Some say only vigils are alarming now;
each cause for grief becomes
a public play, improving on the passé
tragedy of dirt. If you undress
the earth right here, attempt
to excavate the hill, you will find
that every human wish
is buried there, underneath
the Georgian houses, under too
the veneer of asphalt
that hides a catalog of graves
the paraders somehow still recall,
perhaps with a sense
that there is imperfection
in anything that’s made,
or that the alleged ghosts
are all that remain
of an abandoned field hospital,
where now there is a sketchy park
with a seesaw and a too-loose set
of monkey bars, where once
there was a pile of discarded limbs
stacked to the exact height at which
they could hold themselves aloft.
An entire train was later buried
underneath the hill. A tunnel,
poorly built, collapsed. At some point
everyone stopped trying
to dig the survivors out and went back
to whatever it was they’d done before,
despite the fact that witnesses attest
to having heard, for days after,
a muffled noise that seemed
to mimic human speech,
and later still, the quiet ringing
of the Pullman’s bell.
Everything’s exhausting.
No one should be blamed for this.
The parade is over anyway.
All that’s left of whatever grief there was
is the splotchy wax of melted candles,
some plastic cups tossed into a gutter,
a line of cars disappearing into other
darknesses, the echo in the church
of the reenacted speech that Patrick Henry gave
making a nation out of violence.
If I remember right the church bell rang.
Everything was silent
to the west.
Nominally
Every beginning is just a course correction,
the loosest string of the as yet untangled knot, the last
thought not yet lost and so worth playing out
as I wait for some new sadness to begin.
As in, down in the valley where I’m from there is
a parking lot, which covers up a grave,
a name we give in singular for the hundred slaves
they buried there back then. And I am unmoved by the cold
cardinality of this, and all the marks the waves
wore into the outer walls of factories
when the last flash flood that briefly threatened us
came through in ’98. I stand beneath the interstate
as it rumbles overhead and disappears.
There were some names here once.
Some children, too. So what? Nothing
was counted. Order is a myth.
Corona
Four p.m., Late Empire, the historians will write,
the child on the banks of the James
creating a kingdom in his mind
first brings tyranny into the realm
at the end of a kite string, tugging
it this way and that, disinterestedly,
until the kite moving across the sky
becomes a symbol of abjection,
a disgrace, and is hated by the kingdom’s
living god and only subject. In none
of the many volumes written in the boy king’s honor
do they mention the ball of infant snakes
that startled him by drifting out from under
the log on which he stood, causing him
to let loose the string of the kite, but then again,
neither do they tell of the great fire that began
a hundred and fifty years before in a tobacco warehouse
across from where he stood and spread
to every corner of the city until the glow
of the remaining embers was seen
as an ominous beacon by the rebel lookouts on Spy Rock,
a point two hundred miles or more to the west
in the Appalachian Mountains. Shrug,
if you must; history is made of such omissions.
If we had paid more attention
we would not know more. If we were distracted
in the middle kingdom by a cloud
passing over the sun, obscuring
our view of the kite and the city skyline,
now rebuilt, as was the king in his regal isolation,
it would be understood as a natural failing,
one that would perhaps imbue our lives
with greater meaning, but it would not be true.
We would not know how the boy king,
years later, without heirs, would consider
his reign a failure, for how brief it was, an hour,
at best an afternoon, at worst the time it took
for that cloud to pass and dissipate, and he
would watch himself walk down the cobblestone streets,
the lamps forever gaslit, the footpaths of his life
as yet unweathered by the soles of his imagined subjects’
feet, nor by the pair of egrets who flapped their wings above
the river, nor by the long carp swimming out where it became
a brackish estuary, nor by the kite
&n
bsp; flown off into the unverifiable distances.
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.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to take this opportunity to express my thanks to the magazines and journals that previously published some of the poems in this collection. I am also grateful to the faculty and staff at both the Michener Center for Writers and Virginia Commonwealth University, especially Jordan Rice, Gary Sange, Dean Young, and Jim Magnuson. To the many friends who read some or all of these poems, I say thanks, and thanks most of all to Carolina Ebeid, Shamala Gallagher, and Leanna Petronella. I have had the good fortune to work on this collection with a number of extraordinary people at Little, Brown and Company, including Victoria Matsui, Michael Pietsch, Nicole Dewey, and Morgan Moroney. Also, to everyone at RCW, especially Peter Straus, your friendship and guidance are both buoying and indispensable. Finally, to my wife and family, all my love, forever.
About the Author
Kevin Powers is the author of the novel The Yellow Birds, which was a National Book Award finalist, a PEN/Hemingway Award winner, and a Guardian First Book Award winner. Powers was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University, and holds an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, where he was a Michener Fellow in Poetry. He served in the U.S. Army in 2004 and 2005 in Iraq, where he was deployed as a machine gunner in Mosul and Tal Afar. This is his first collection of poetry.
Also by Kevin Powers
The Yellow Birds
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Dedication
OneCustoms
Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting
Great Plain
Inheritance
Blue Star Mother
Independence Day
Valentine with Flat Affect
Elegy for Urgency
Meditation on a Main Supply Route
TwoImprovised Explosive Device
Self-Portrait in Sidewalk Chalk
A History of Yards
Death, Mother and Child
Field Manual
After Leaving McGuire Veterans’ Hospital for the Last Time
Separation
Actuary
Photographing the Suddenly Dead
ThreeCumberland Gap
The Torch and Pitchfork Blues
Fighting out of West Virginia
In the Ruins of the Ironworks
Songs in Planck Time
The Abhorrence of Coincidence
While Trying to Make an Arrowhead in the Fashion of the Mattaponi Indians
FourThe Locks of the James
Church Hill
Nominally
Corona
An Alternate History of the Destruction of Dresden by Fire
Portugal
Advice to Be Taken Just Before the Sun Goes Supernova
A Lamp in the Place of the Sun
Grace Note
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Kevin Powers
Newsletters
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Kevin Powers
Cover design by Oliver Munday
Cover copyright © 2014 by Hachette Book Group
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976,