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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2004 : Robert Hill Long
GULF WAR NEWS SIGN-OFF, WITH VIDEO TRICKS
Today's war ended the way yesterday's war ended:
a Star-Spangled Banner duet
scored for Mount Rushmore and F-16.
It's two shots of tequila past midnight.
The F-16's wings hallucinate —
through the spotting scope of my twenty inch Zenith —
into sky-calipers, measuring the gap
between Lincoln's eye and ear.
So the warplane is catapulted full-grown
from the democracy-god's stone forehead?
— or does it plunge in, a myth-sized re-enactment
of the first time this country tried to murder itself,
with a stage actor's derringer, in a suburban theater?
In the granite brain, F-16's fuselage fades,
not like bullet fragments but like tissue in a skull X-ray.
Then Lincoln dissolves like the ice in my drink,
and F-16 warps back, this time even stranger —
its wingtips join Washington's lips to Jefferson's lips,
and Rushmore dissolves
like a sugar cube on a president's tongue.
___________________________________
In the video war of my fortieth year,
I stared through the smart-bomb lens.
It was not like Slim Pickens in Doctor Strangelove,
whooping, waving his cowboy hat as he rides the Bomb
like a Brahma bull down on Russia,
but claustrophobic, like being stuffed
in the iron lung I dreaded as a boy and falling
headfirst, with my face as detonator.
It was feeling my atoms crushed and fused anew
inside something the size of a sea lion
closing in, steel-skinned and unswerving, for the kill.
Chair pulled close to midnight's television,
I sat with the sound off, as the white beam
translated me into an optic weapon.
Over and over the smart bomb guided me
down into Iraqi hangars, convoy trucks, air-raid shelters.
For days afterward — while oil wells incandesced
and made black pillars for the sky-altar,
while the desert burned like a sacrificial bull,
horn, hoof and hide, on which the human dead,
tiny as ticks, swelled and blackened and burst —
I walked around dissonant, disembodied,
New England winter locked in my head-up display.
My neighbor's icicled barn
where he restored English race cars;
a Chevy Caprice coughing exhaust in the graveyard
as its owner wiped snow off plastic geraniums in an urn;
the Mobil station fluorescing in sleety darkness
while the bright steel vessels sucked at
its inexhaustible pumps, then roared back out
on Route 9: whatever I looked at hard
froze in my regard, was reduced to a gray-scale image
in my winter screen, and a bright little x,
blinking like a computer cursor,
flew out of the corner of my eye and vaporized it.
___________________________________
And now midnight's Maine sunrise,
midnight's Big Sur sunset: x and x and x,
soft-porn orgasms of hydrogen and oxygen and carbon
dissolving in F-16's smoke exhale,
what it sky-writes in a lyric contrail
in the thousand square pixels of my television,
Was it good for you?
F-16 loves America the way Zeus loved Greece,
ready to missile-fuck any mortal thing
that makes a wrong move in its striking range,
and America, at the anthem end of the broadcast day,
loves F-16 like a miracle-Icarus
able to fly straight at any lesser empire's sun
and melt it, with a laser-guided kiss,
into post-midnight video static
when we are as close to heaven
as the big granite fathers are to serious kissing.
America the black pillow, rock glass full
of high-octane fumes and transcendence,
America the black personal remote:
some nights after the brass band finishes off
in my rec room and the male-voiced machine
announces its visions are concluded,
tequila-slugged, I slouch in the dark, controller
in my hand still aimed into a black snow of fragments
my eyes fly through, still armed with x
after x after x, into the static cloud of the kill.
This poem won First Prize in the 2004 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Author Robert Long received a $1,000 award. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Robert Hill Long
Robert Hill Long was raised and educated in North Carolina.
His books include The Power to Die,
The Work of the Bow and
The Effigies.
He has been awarded fellowships by the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 2004) and by the arts councils of North Carolina and Oregon.
His work has been anthologized in Best American Poetry and Flash Fiction and Web del Sol,
and over the past thirty years has appeared in journals across America, including
DoubleTake, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, Manoa, New England Review, Poetry, The Prose Poem, Virginia Quarterly Review and Zyzzyva. Read
more poetry and flash fiction by Mr. Long.
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