Bravo, and: Charlie, and: Foxtrot, and: November, and: Tango, and: Zulu
Rent from DeepDyve- Bravo, and: Charlie, and: Foxtrot, and: November, and: Tango, and: Zulu
- Bravo
The psalmists knew how to begin: by buttering up. Who is like God? Or How excellent is thy name! I will sing a new song unto the Lord, because my old songs got me nowhere. I need a song with legs, a rock song for the ages, anthemic and propulsive to make the stadium leap with affirmation. The stadium loves to leap into the arclights, loves to wave its hands and tiny fires as if they were essential to the song, and loves to sing along. Love me! Love me! sing we all together, for thy name’s sake.
- Charlie
A new song. A carol, say, to constancy—not the Northstar’s stubborn pivot, boring nightlong through the pole, but the modest steadfastness of the Big Dipper. Draw a line across its basin, star to star and then beyond the constellation till you find, near-invisible, true North. Selfless gesture, at every hour to point and point away to some obscure and ever-fixèd mark, to be prized for pure devotion, for how it bears the gaze away . . . Isn’t that how it is, in love as in war: someone gets to pull the wagon, and someone, girding his smallness in glittering mail, gets to be Charlemagne. [End Page 38]
- Foxtrot
A new song, a new step. From the foxholes of the Great War the soldiers staggered into commissariat hotels, R&R illusions at the fringes of the front. The patriotic girls waited in their dancing shoes to shimmer through the newest-fangled slow-slow-quick-quick, because there wasn’t any time to waltz. There never is. We bang into one another, tangle up and try to time our lurches to the timbrel and harp, to give them a shape that is comely and pleasing to make us forget for a moment the trenches and the grand historic sweep of hurt. Selah. [End Page 39]
- November
Thirty days hath &c., but this one feels like forever, leaves taking their final separation from the limbs that long have loved them. Does the leaf strain beyond its petiole’s strength, or does the branch at last let go? What an agony, to watch it happen again and again, until the yard is filled with summer’s resignations. The light is crisp. A warm wind moves in the trees, stirring up a thousand golden swivels. It’s enough to make you pray for winter.
- Tango
It takes two. Two to tangle. Two to gaze moon-eyed, to break into conversation. To sound the verse and antiphon. Two to hang a picture level. Two to screw in a light bulb, if one of them’s a joker. It takes two to fracas, two to fuck. It takes two for transgression, two for atonement, two to hang around and talk this day of paradise. Two for prayer, and two for the prayer denied. But it only takes one to give up. [End Page 40]
- Zulu
The compass; the ancient dictionaries; the telescopic array; the atomic tick of meridian time: my first mistake was to believe that by sounding the furthest measures I might recover what was lost. The joke’s on me. In the beginning was the originary split: heaven and earth irreconciled. So every thing is born to loss, and every word is grief.
Outside, in the fundamental night, stars struggle up from the east. The clock-hands struggle to the vertical hour. Somewhere, on the other side of the world, the sun is rising. [End Page 41]
“These six selections are from a twenty-six-page unlineated poem called ‘Siege Psalter,’ each section of which takes its title from a letter of the military alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie...
