of shadows cast sanguine in their repose.

Cameras click in shuttered housings. The landscape

a pornographic scene caught in apertures

opened wide: sand tables in their martial aspect,

compass points, barchan dunes, the far horizon’s body line

in rocky silhouette, where Earth is a small, warm light

rising zenith blue beyond the dusk, where I am still a boy,

barefoot on the wet grass of the San Joaquin valley,

the millions of miles between made closer by opposition.

In the old days, they say the desert Arabs hung lanterns

high in the date palms, a guide for friends and strangers

traveling by night. And maybe that’s what I’m doing

as I search for lamps in the night’s vast amphitheater,

even if I don’t know how to put it into words –

I’m searching for the face on Mars, so much like our own,

made from dust and to dust returning, the wind’s erosion

calling into the void with that brutal instrument, pain.

And like so many before me, I listen.

I want to hear how the great questions posed by ruin

are given the elegant response of stone.

How we, like Aphrodite, are seduced.

Perimeter Watch

I lock the doors tonight, check the bolts twice

just to make sure. Turn off all the lights.

Only the fan blades rotate above, slow as helicopters

winding down their oily gears.

Water buffalo

chew the front lawn, snorting. When the sprinklers

switch on, white cowbirds lift up from the grass

with heavy wing-beats, a column of feathers

rising over my rooftop, their wing-tips

backlit by the moon.

Through venetian blinds

I see the Iraqi prisoners in that dank cell at Firebase Eagle

staring back at me. They say nothing, just as they did

in the winter of 2004, shivering in the piss-cold dark,

on scraps of cardboard, staring.

Snipers traverse the skyline

from the neighbor’s rooftop. Helicopters on station,

fifteen minutes out. And it’s difficult to tell the living

from the dead, walking the dim elephant grass, papyrus thickets

lining the asphalt streets. I see Bosch, my old rifleman,

sleepwalking – on fire and unaware of it.

I see the Stryker,

Ghost 3, parked at the curb. I know the guys inside

watch Iraqi women in the white-hot lens

of the gun-mount camera, eager for the smolder

of their sex. A minivan idles with passengers dying inside

while down the street, an explosion sets off

the neighbor’s car alarm.

Then, quiet.

The wounded wait with great patience for Doc High,

who treats them by the pool in the backyard,

where I can see the Turkish cook with shrapnel

in the back of his head, his mouth still foaming.

Beside him, the dead infant from that cold blue morning

in the orange groves of Balad, while in the pool

a battalion scout floats face down

in the current.

Where is my M-4? My smoke grenades?

My flak vest and plates of body armor? I wander the house