The Overlook
1.
I admit that I’m at a loss for words today.
on the one hand, we are only on speaking terms
in light of a long posterity that burns away
human dross; on the other, the very real burning
of human bodies, or the other mutilations
occasioned, say, by an aerial bombardment
maybe an hour’s drive from here, close enough
for me to hear, or imagine that I hear,
from a high hilltop just west of Jerusalem,
a repeated ground-shaking whomp, make me fear
not for my own safety, but an unravelling
of everything we hold dear,
also human dross, the syllables we string
together, without which posterity means nothing.
2.
The mesmerizing quality of air war
when seen from a distance, even if that distance
is minimal, as the crow flies, the measure
a question of which senses
come into play when apprehending, say,
systems for delivering high-yield munitions
(how contrails make a writing, almost, in the sky),
and if sound switches off, are we truly there?
Likewise the anticipation or memory
that makes us duck or startle, search for cover,
and aphoria, an affliction of the heart
or the whole body, a generalized bunkering
of the senses, a brittle voice, this one, heard
through glass, unless by you, here and not here.
3.
Misreading the Greek, I used aphoria
as a nonce word to mean “feeling nothing,”
and got it all wrong. Etymologically
it means “holding nothing,” whence the ache in numbness,
and the accepted, clinical usage, “barrenness,”
which fits, if the heart is the seat of conception,
if feeling itself is aborted in the face of a violence,
this one, a series of nightly bombardments,
but even when we find ourselves beyond grief, hands,
ours, someone else’s, pull the children’s
bodies from the rubble, cradle
them a little while, and a childless man
is watching from a hilltop
not far from here, wants to turn away, watches still.
I admit that I’m at a loss for words today.
on the one hand, we are only on speaking terms
in light of a long posterity that burns away
human dross; on the other, the very real burning
of human bodies, or the other mutilations
occasioned, say, by an aerial bombardment
maybe an hour’s drive from here, close enough
for me to hear, or imagine that I hear,
from a high hilltop just west of Jerusalem,
a repeated ground-shaking whomp, make me fear
not for my own safety, but an unravelling
of everything we hold dear,
also human dross, the syllables we string
together, without which posterity means nothing.
2.
The mesmerizing quality of air war
when seen from a distance, even if that distance
is minimal, as the crow flies, the measure
a question of which senses
come into play when apprehending, say,
systems for delivering high-yield munitions
(how contrails make a writing, almost, in the sky),
and if sound switches off, are we truly there?
Likewise the anticipation or memory
that makes us duck or startle, search for cover,
and aphoria, an affliction of the heart
or the whole body, a generalized bunkering
of the senses, a brittle voice, this one, heard
through glass, unless by you, here and not here.
3.
Misreading the Greek, I used aphoria
as a nonce word to mean “feeling nothing,”
and got it all wrong. Etymologically
it means “holding nothing,” whence the ache in numbness,
and the accepted, clinical usage, “barrenness,”
which fits, if the heart is the seat of conception,
if feeling itself is aborted in the face of a violence,
this one, a series of nightly bombardments,
but even when we find ourselves beyond grief, hands,
ours, someone else’s, pull the children’s
bodies from the rubble, cradle
them a little while, and a childless man
is watching from a hilltop
not far from here, wants to turn away, watches still.
