by Tom Sleigh
pulses more real than real.
The post-nuclear, post-holocaust rain he tried to understand
is only another afternoon when the world ends.
And now what passes through him
is a windchime ringing, casting parabolic shadows on the ground
as he hunches at work in his little cubicle,
a cell 8 × 10
which is just another world coming to an end
when twenty years on since the chiming ceased,
I try again to understand the points he plots
where thrust equals gravity and drag
so the rocket can keep soaring on forever.
10
Glowing on the screen, the initial
capital in the shape of Omega holds inside its void
two flying dragons biting their own tails.
And on another page
Alpha traces out the lines
of the Tower of Babel collapsing.
And just beneath that, a king lies dreaming of a golden statue
crushed by a stone that becomes a great mountain
so that the four kingdoms, gold, silver, brass, iron,
shine in gilt from the vellum—
and across Daniel’s face the shadow of a wing
which is the Lord’s wing whispering to Daniel the dream of the king
turns black as the screen when the screen goes to sleep
and a hand writes an unknown equation across the dark.
Valediction
The backyard lives of cat and bird
and the way leaves give themselves
away this instant to the all-but-no breeze
creeping across the silver-painted roof where clouds,
reflected, pass dark, then bright
above a book left out by the vacant deck chair
fluttering its pages, signaling to the reader somewhere out of sight
to come back, come back and start the book over,
this all arrives without a valediction forbidding anything,
just the sense of seeing something
or someone for the last time: the poet’s faded fedora
in a tea-store window haunting this October’s primary
blues bringing back mid-May and the missing mate
of the nightingale singing “day long and night late.”
i.m. Seamus Heaney
NOTES
“The Craze”
Demmies is short for “demolition experts.”
“Hunger”
Ba, Akh, and Duat are terms used in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ba is a spiritual entity, often depicted as a human-headed bird hovering over the deceased’s body, or exiting the tomb. It’s the part of the soul that can travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. Akh is the “blessed or ‘transfigured’ soul” of a dead person whose soul has been judged to be just by Osiris and so is allowed to enter the Afterlife. Duat is the dangerous landscape of the underworld, complete with demons and monsters who guard the gates that the Ba has to pass through in becoming an Akh.
“Eclipse”
A panga is a bush knife shaped much like a machete.
A matatu is a minibus used as an inexpensive, shared taxi by most ordinary people in Nairobi. They are often decorated with pictures of movie stars, musicians, politicians, and other famous people, as well as religious leaders. They are often equipped with sound systems that blare Motown, R & B, and Afro-Pop.
“KM4”
KM4 refers to a central roundabout in Mogadishu, Somalia, near the Ministry of Education building where a suicide bomber, on October 4, 2011, killed 100 people and injured more than 110 others.
A macawis is a sarong-like garment worn by men.
A chador is a long robe worn by Muslim women.
UNHCR stands for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
“Proof of Poetry”
The poem is indebted to a passage from Aleksander Wat’s My Century.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Agni: “Party at Marquis de Sade’s Place”
The American Poetry Review: “The Negative”
Blackbird: “KM4”
The Commons: “The Eclipse”
The Cortland Review: “ER,” “Hunger”
Five Points: “Homage to Zidane” (under the title, “World Cup”), “Refugee Camp”
The New Yorker: “Homage to Mary Hamilton,” “A Short History of Communism and the Enigma of Surplus Value”
Plume: “From the Ass’s Mouth: A Theory of the Leisure Class,” “Stairway,” “Proof of Poetry”
Poem-a-Day, poets.org, Academy of American Poets: “The Parallel Cathedral”
Poetry: “Homage to Vallejo,” “The Animals in the Zoo Don’t Seem Worried,” “Homage to Bashō” (published, in a different version, under the title, “Six Trees and Two White Dogs … Doves?”)
Raritan: “Valediction,” “Songs for the Cold War,” “Prayer for Recovery”
The Threepenny Review: “Second Sight”
Tikkun: “Songs for the End of the World”
Tin House: “The Craze,” “The Twins”
The Village Voice: “Dogcat Soul,” “Global Warming Fugue”
The Yale Review: “‘Let Thanks Be Given to the Raven as Is Its Due’”
My thanks to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the generous support provided by the John Updike Award, and to Alan, Michael, and Josh for their encouragement and criticism.
Tom Sleigh is the author of nine collections of poetry, including Army Cats and Space Walk, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; a collection of essays, Interview with a Ghost; and a translation of Euripides’ Herakles. He has won the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, an Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, and grants and awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Lila Wallace Fund. He is a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College, where he teaches in the MFA Program. Recently, Sleigh has been traveling as a journalist in Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Book design by Connie Kuhnz. Composition by BookMobile Design and Publishing Services, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Manufactured by Versa Press on acid-free, 30 percent postconsumer wastepaper.