0.

a poet is good for nothing

a poet is good for nothing

a poet is good for nothing

someone go find him

a spade

a shovel

something to dig with

send him

to make a trench

or something

1.

there is no language that could possibly hold all of this

to write about war is to swallow

barbed wire inch by inch

slowly

to wrap your bare arms

and legs

around an antitank hedgehog

when you are asleep

to screw metal words

into the crushed bones of the morning

one

after another

to shell the bean pods of your words

open like bullet casings

to shake loose

death black lentils

pain peas of lead

to drink from puddles

first the deafening rumble

then the thick scarlet silence

2.

you thrust that language of yours everywhere

like a dirty finger into a wound

to convince yourself

to testify

the way a broken carafe testifies

to the existence of water

a broken radio witnesses

the mystery of electromagnetism

the reality boils over

red milk

overflows

leaves a dark stain on the stove

the empty pot of the poet’s mouth

sputters and pops

helpless

grows all black inside

3.

language here reaches its limit beyond which it is

a scream a gulp a rattle a croak a squeak

bones picked white by the birds

the scaffolding around

the bombed-out theater’s walls

look language stands as empty

as a house

from which everyone had been

taken outside

and shot

look my words are as nimble

as a pair of crutches

walking on their own

look

they dance too

4.

say what you will

scream all you want

poet

death can’t hear you

either way

made deaf in both ears by the blasts

made blind in both eyes by the shrapnel

she gropes through the city

like homer’s cyclops

she gropes each one us

with her cold

moist fingers

her large tired body

smells of metal and fire

and each of us

is before her

a nobody

5.

a poet

is a graduate

of the high school of powerlessness

who failed to learn

a single lesson

we feel our rickety boats

sinking deeper and deeper

under each

new load of silence

we stand atop

and swing language

as if it were a staff

as if we could hope

to part this sea of despair

and walk its bottom

like solid ground

to the far shore

of war

6.

lord you know it well

a poet’s tongue is only good for two things

to sing of death

and of victory

so grant us our lord

tongues of iron

that we might lick clean

these roads

this asphalt

lick them free of all trace of our foes

lick them clean of all splattered blood

leaving untouched

only that one little crack

where a thick

green stem

stubbornly pushes upward