Like a Man Gone Mad: Poems in a New Century

In the Fifth Year of the War

90 In the Fifth Year of the War Saturday in Arlington. Propping her crutch against a bench, a blonde unpockets her Nokia and takes a call that makes her laugh. A man whose head is shaven glossy sleeps faceup on the grass, a half-read Time spread-eagled on his chest. A girl with a star studded in one eyebrow strolls and waits for good news she hopes might happen. The spaniel she tows on a leash decides she’s been walked to wet, and wet she does in a female squat. Two miles away the President of the United States is jogging the White House track with twin amputees. Last week he addressed a sixth of his projected national audience. He focused on “success” in one-fourteenth of all Iraq. Later on cable a Marine sergeant described his Humvee’s driver 91 after the ambush. “He had his eyeball in his hand, and he kept trying to put it back in.” Still later a movie star was beeped when she blasphemed the war on its one thousandth six hundredth and forty-fourth day. ...