HUMANITARIAN WAR FUGUE
We killed with the best of intentions.
The goals that we died for were sound.
The notions we killed for were sterling,
our motives the sort that one mentions,
frankly, with pride.
Quit scrupling,
quibbling, lying down and
lay this down:
Bad guys by the graveful we gunned down so
girls, little girls
by the classful, could go to school. Girls, too, busing to school,
we slew so girls could go to school unharmed, in error
we slew them, with better intentions, bad eggs however we harmed
to win hearts, warm cockles, gain guts and livers and limbs and minds
with decent intentions, good eggs we even armed (only good eggs
armed)—the rest we smashed, truncated,
atomized until the doves among us
buckled, seldom seeing dead
men un-
dismantled, while heads of this and that kept touting,
hawking our cause like crack,
our crystal intentions, motives one mentions
especially when aim is less than exact
and friendlies get fried…
With downsized intentions we killed and we strafed
and we mortared and missiled and mined,
sniped too, droned too,
till we wilted to haunts in OSI wards, nightly
wading tarns and tar-ponds incarnadine,
and they dosed and discharged and forsook us,
but on we kept killing with credible reasons
in a lush neural loop of gibbering visions
from hovering gunships, maniacally hooting,
culling the groundlings with motives forgotten
to a playlist of metal eternally cycling…
Of course, looking back, you would like to reboot
and start over, but there is no over—
this spraying and shredding forever recursive—
this Gatling drum always ample with ammo—
and papa and papa our weapons keep bleating—
a ceaseless returning and endless rehearsing—
you’re killing with the best of
with the best of them
killing with the best of
with the best of them, killing,
CORONACH, POST-KANDAHAR
1
The damaged individual is invited to seek treatment,
albeit at some future date
Lance-corporal, here—
this comfort song, or (if prayer
is the protocol you prefer)
this prayer.
When you visit the clinic
we’ll cook up a cure
for your sadness and panic.
Meanwhile pills,
meanwhile prayer.
Even to an atheist
God’s the Omega
of a shotgun’s business end.
2
The patient, still on a waiting list, suffers a major
coronary, for which he is promptly treated
His ribcage we cracked
and his heart we drew clear
like a red, writhing newborn
pulled from the rubble.
They said that in public
his punchlining brilliance
disguised desperation.
Take this, if you’re manic—
come visit the clinic—
we’ve an opening
early next March.
Even to an atheist
God’s the cold ordnance
of a twelve-gauge applied to the heart.
3
In which an appointment, of kinds, is finally found
for our patient
At the wake
(closed casket)
the piper
was drunk
but managed
a coronach.
CLINICAL NOTES OF THE BIPOLAR THERAPIST
1 The Calvados by lamplight is an oily gold, a liquor pressed
from bullion. Taste the essence of Norman summers—the
fruit-sweetening sun, salt-bearing breezes of the English
Channel, flotillas of cloud cooling the coastline. Proustian
autumns, mellow and rich; the windless weeks of the apple
harvest. Your snifter, brimming with brandy, exhales the scent
of ancient orchards.
2 With your patient you are driving a dog-sled over a frozen sea
under a sky trembling with a red aurora, blood pouring down
a dark face. Your patient yells and whips the team onward. A
bitch is whelping as she runs, dropping raw, mouse-sized
pups onto the ice. The other dogs scoop them up and swallow
them without breaking pace. You hurtle north toward that sky
and, you are certain, open water.
3 The drink’s mission is to italicize the effect of several dozen
tranquilizers while masking their aftertaste. You arrange the
Celestanox (7.5 mg) on the edge of your desk, in neat formation,
like a cycle of birth control pills. This really ought to do it. You
chase them with another full snifter and taste again those
schoolboy summers at Grand-papa’s orchard near St-Valentin.
4 The ones coming back from the war are the worst. You listen
and prescribe—rest cure, work cure, drugs. You’d rather not
prescribe them but you must. Even dust degrades to finer dust.
We find you slumped at your desk in a pool of your own fluids
and we revive you, pump your stomach, and your body survives.
Bodies are made to, minds not so much. The ones that come
back from the war, et cetera. Even dust falls to finer dust.
5 Your patient grew up in northern Quebec, son of a white
trapper and Inuit mother. At twenty, Pete saw the war as a
way out. And so it was. Up there everyone knew how to use a
shotgun, he said, because of the fucking bears, though he
never had to kill one. He did waste a guy in Panjwai with his
C7 and it wasn’t like online. Wasn’t even a man—wouldn’t a
man over there have a beard?
“Yes, I fear so.”
Doctor, feel but don’t overfeel.
6 Above all, don’t get too involved! You can care but you must
not love! Up north, when a big tide went out, they could crawl
and then walk under the ice and it was alcohol blue and they
could hear the sea in the far off and Sorels treading above.
Pete kept coming back to that, curled like a glove in his chair.
Many came home like him, but not all kept shotguns ready.
When the tide returns, man, you gotta move fast!
Doctor, I order you not to love.
