Phantom Noise
Description
BRIAN TURNER
PHANTOM NOISE
Shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize
Brian Turner’s first book of poems, Here, Bullet, was a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq War by a soldier-poet. In Phantom Noise he pumps up the volume as he faces and tries to deal with the traumatic aftermath of war. Flashbacks explode the daily hell of Baghdad into the streets and malls of peaceful California, at the same time sending Turner’s imagination reeling back to Iraq. If he thought he had written all he could of his Iraq experiences in Here, Bullet, he was mistaken, for what he saw and felt there affected him so profoundly that more poems had to be written, years later, from a place of apparent safety.
Brian Turner writes a powerful poetry of witness, exceptional for its beauty, honesty and skill. Like Keith Douglas’s poems from the North African desert in the Second World War, Turner’s testament from the war in Iraq offers unflinchingly accurate description but no moral judgement, leaving the reader to draw any conclusions. Repetitive media reports show little of people’s daily experience of the war and occupation. In Phantom Noise, as in Here, Bullet, we see and feel the devastatingly surreal reality of everyday life and death for soldiers and civilians through the eyes of an eloquent writer who served in the US Army for seven years, with a year’s tour of duty in Iraq as an infantry team leader.
‘With courage and an uncommon willingness to see the world as it actually is, Brian Turner returns in Phantom Noise with a bullet-borne language in which helicopters hover like spiders over a film of water. His poem Al-A’imma Bridge alone proves his mastery, and joins him to the tradition of Wilfred Owen and David Jones, for he is their descendant, his poetic gifts detonated into a spray of lyric force that will mark what is possible in poetry for years to come, a chiseling of agony onto paper and a poignant cri de coeur to the republic of conscience’ – Carolyn Forché
COVER PAINTING: Ahmed Nussaif: War
COVER ART PROVIDED WITH THE SUPPORT OF IRAQI ART NFP
www.iraqi-art.com
BRIAN TURNER
PHANTOM NOISE
CONTENTS
Title Page
Acknowledgements
VA Hospital Confessional
At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center
Howl Wind
Aubade: Layover in Amsterdam
The Whale
Chinese Ink Brush Painting
Sleeping in Dick Cheney’s Bed
Viking 1
Perimeter Watch
Illumination Rounds
Puget Sound
Al-A’imma Bridge
Helping Her Breathe
Guarding the Bomber
Phantom Noise
Zippo
Homemade Napalm
Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon
Lucky Money
On the Flight to Alamosa, Colorado
Wading Out
White Phosphorus
.22 Caliber
Green Alexandrine
On the Surgeon’s Table
Unearthed by Wind
Madinat Al-Salam
Stopping the American Infantry Patrol Near the Prophet Yunus Mosque in Mosul, Abu Ali Shows Them the Cloth in His Pocket
Tell Me, Beautiful One, from Where Did the Lord Bring You?
Insignia
Mohammed Trains for the Beijing Olympics, 2008
A Lullaby for Bullets
The Discothèque
Jundee Ameriki
American Internal
To My Unnamed Daughter
Ajal
The Inventory from a Year Spent Sleeping with Bullets
The Mutanabbi Street Bombing
Eucalyptus
In the Tannour Oven
Study of Nudes by Candlelight
In the Guggenheim Museum
The One Square Inch Project
NOTES
About the Author
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Phantom Noise was first published in the US in 2010 by Alice James Books. This first UK edition reprints the contents of that book, with the addition of one poem not included in the original American edition, ‘On the Surgeon’s Table’, along with some minor amendments.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following journals and anthologies in which these poems appeared, sometimes in slightly different forms: Alehouse Press: ‘Study of the Nudes by Candlelight’; The Alhambra Poetry Calendar (2010): ‘Dar as-Salam’; Between Water and Song: New Poets for the Twenty-First Century (White Pine Press): ‘Wading Out’ and ‘Guarding the Bomber’; The Columbia Poetry Review: ‘Jundee Ameriki’; The Cortland Review: ‘Homemade Napalm’; The Georgia Review: ‘Wading Out’; Literary Witnesses: ‘Lucky Money’; The New York Times online: ‘Guarding the Bomber’; The Northwest Review: ‘Stopping the American Infantry Patrol Near the Prophet Yunus Mosque in Mosul, Abu Ali Shows Them the Cloth in His Pocket’, ‘Mohammed Trains for the Beijing Olympics, 2008’; The Portland Review: ‘.22 Caliber’; Southword (Ireland): ‘Eucalyptus’, ‘To My Unnamed Daughter’, ‘A Lullaby for Bullets’; The Stinging Fly (Ireland): ‘American Internal’; Stone Canoe: ‘At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center’; The Virginia Quarterly Review: ‘Unearthed by Wind’, ‘Perimeter Watch’, ‘VA Hospital Confessional’, ‘On the Flight to Alamosa, Colorado’, ‘The Discothèque’, ‘Ajal’.
My deepest gratitude to the following: Dan Albergotti, Donald Anderson, Doug Anderson, Siah Armajani, Stephen Barile, Aliki Barnstone, Tony Barnstone, Willis Barnstone, Sarah Barr, Paul Bellowar, Tom Bosch, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Kevin Bowen, Kurt Brown, Kim Buchheit, Rosanne Cahn, Matt Cashion, Cyrus Cassells, Peter Catapano, Jo Chapman, Russell Conrad, Patrick Cotter, Tim Crowley, Martín Espada, Tony Fiorillo, Patsy Garoupa, Ted Genoways, Paul Guest, James Haba, Corrinne Clegg Hales, Charles Hanzlicek, James Hathaway, Lee Herrick, Garrett Hongo, Doug and Tristan Humble, T.R. Hummer, David Jackowski, Martha Jessup, Haider Al-Kabi, Marion Kelly, Maura Kennedy, Dorianne Laux, Suzie Lechtenberg, Kwang Ho Lee, Philip Levine, Soheil Najm, Anne Marie Macari, Adrian Matejka, Khaled Mattawa, Declan Meade, Col. Tom McGuire, Sadek Mohammed, LTC John A. Nagl, Oliver de la Paz, Mike Robinson, Summer Rodman, Patricia Smith, R. Southerland, Tim Skeen, Gerald Stern, Ernesto Trejo, Charles Trimbach, Bill Tuell, Jessica Valls, Dan Veach, Bruce Weigl, Barry Wexler, Sholeh Wolpe and Steve Yarbrough.
I would like to thank the Lannan Foundation, Alison Granucci at Blue Flower Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences, Matt O’Donnell at From the Fishouse, Dan at Grolier Poetry Bookshop, Tim Crowley at the Marfa Bookstore, and the Kerouac Project of Orlando, Florida for their kind and generous support of my work (and for all they do to support artists).
Many thanks to Neil Astley, Julia Bouwsma, Todd Davis, Patrick Hicks, Ilya Kaminsky, Dunya Mikhail, Joe Millar, Ahmed Nussaif, April Ossmann, Carey Salerno, Lacy Simons and Ellen Doré Watson, for their guidance, insight and kind support of this work. Love and thanks to my family and friends, with special thanks to Stacey Lynn Brown, Brian Voight, and – of course – to Ilyse.
VA Hospital Confessional
Each night is different. Each night the same.
Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t.
When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,
gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?
When I don’t, he douses himself
in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.
A dog barks in the night’s illuminated green landscape
and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.
Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.
My lover has learned to face away.
She closes her eyes when I fuck her. I imagine
she’s far away and we don’t use the word love.
When she sleeps, helicopters
come in low over the date palms.
Men are bound on their knees, shivering
in the animal stall, long before dawn.
I whisper into their ears, saying,
Howlwin? Howlwin? Meaning, Mortars? Mortars?
Howl wind, motherfucker? Howl wind?
The milk cow stares with its huge brown eyes.
The milk cow wants to know
how I can do this to another human being.
I check the haystack in the corner
for a weapons cache. I check the sewage sump.
I tell no one, but sometimes late at night
I uncover rifles and bullets within me.
Other nights I drive through Baghdad.
Firebaugh. Bakersfield. Kettleman City.
Some nights I’m up in the hatch, shooting
a controlled pair into someone’s radiator.
Some nights I hear a woman screaming.
Others I shoot the crashing car.
When the boy brings us a platter of fruit,
I mistake cantaloupe for a human skull.
Sometimes the gunman fires into the house.
Sometimes the gunman fires at me.
Every night it’s different.
Every night the same.
Some nights I pull the trigger.
Some nights I burn him alive.
I embrace the frightful and the beautiful
AL-BAYATI
At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center
Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and anchor aisle,
I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails
open by accident, their oily bright shanks
and diamond points like firing pins
from M-4s and M-16s.
In a steady stream
they pour onto the tile floor, constant as shells
falling south of Baghdad last night, where Bosch
kneeled under the chain guns of helicopters
stationed above, their tracer-fire a synaptic geometry
of light.
At dawn, when the shelling stops,
hundreds of bandages will not be enough.
Bosch is walking down aisle 16 now, in full combat gear,
improbable, worn out from fatigue, a rifle
slung at his side, his left hand guiding
a ten-year-old boy who sees what war is
and will never clear it from his head.
Here, Bosch says, Take care of him.
I’m going back in for more.
Sheets of plywood drop with the airy breath
of mortars the moment they crack open
in shrapnel. Mower blades are just mower blades
and the Troy-Bilt Self-Propelled Mower doesn’t resemble
a Blackhawk or an Apache. In fact, no one seems to notice
the casualty collection center Doc High is marking out
in ceiling fans, aisle 15. Wounded Iraqis with IVs
sit propped against boxes as 92 sample Paradiso fans
hover over in a slow revolution of blades.
The forklift driver over-adjusts, swinging the tines
until they slice open gallons and gallons of paint,
Sienna Dust and Lemon Sorbet and Ship’s Harbor Blue
pooling in the aisle where Sgt Rampley walks through –
carrying someone’s blown-off arm cradled like an infant,
handing it to me, saying, Hold this, Turner,
we might find who it belongs to.
Cash registers open and slide shut
with a sound of machine guns being charged.
Dead soldiers are laid out at the registers,
on the black conveyor belts,
and people in line still reach
for their wallets. Should I stand
at the magazine rack, reading
Landscaping with Stone or The Complete
Home Improvement Repair Book?
What difference does it make if I choose
tumbled travertine tile, Botticino marble,
or Black Absolute granite. Outside,
palm trees line the asphalt boulevards,
restaurants cool their patrons who will enjoy
fireworks exploding over Bass Lake in July.
Aisle number 7 is a corridor of lights.
Each dead Iraqi walks amazed
by Tiffany posts and Bavarian pole lights.
Motion-activated incandescents switch on
as they pass by, reverent sentinels of light,
Fleur De Lis and Luminaire Mural Extérieur
welcoming them to Lowe’s Home Improvement Center,
aisle number 7, where I stand in mute shock,
someone’s arm cradled in my own.
The Iraqi boy beside me
reaches down to slide his fingertip in Retro Colonial Blue,
an interior latex, before writing
T, for Tourniquet, on my forehead.
Howl Wind
I see people riding on shrieking horses,
steering clouds of sparkbelching fires
on their way to flame life out of you
MAHD AL-AADIYYA (4000 BCE)
Launched from its tube, the mortar round
accelerates to the apogee of its flight,
rising fast to what the gunners call
the high angle of hell, the round
suspended over the city lights below,
where any one of us might find ourselves
deep within the very last day of our life,
but wholly unaware of the fact – unaware
that the steel-hard visitations of death
hang from the heavens above,
and if there’s someone we would kiss
goodbye, or a few words we’d rather share
than leave unspoken, then now is the time,
because just as missiles were hurled in fire
from catapults of old, a mortar round
howls a night wind over the city,
and just where it lands
we will see.
Aubade: Layover in Amsterdam
My lover turns in the California bedroom’s
watery dark, arching her back from that slow
smooth glissando of heat within flesh,
our bodies rising on coiled springs
as if riding a wave of tension,
the room beneath us fading, my head leaning back,
eyes closing to the bright points of light,
my mouth filling with a long vowel
lifting into moonlight, the jet stream
blowing through my hair, the earth curving below;
rising over the cold waters of the Atlantic
to 30,000 feet, I begin to sense the imminent
descent toward the Red Lights of Amsterdam,
the clock reversing itself to the spring of 2004,
where I lie with a woman who knows
I’m a man heading back to war,
and I want her to whisper in my ear,
even in a language I’ve never heard before,
just to hear another human voice, just to breathe in the dark.
The Whale
It is 1970
and the summer of love is over.
I am three years old, barefoot,
running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,
where an eight-ton sperm whale
beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean –
but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers
overhead, my mother
hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
of muscle and bone –
the way life waits for us all
with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,
the sudden
jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
to cover his head with a clipboard
while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
turned away from the blast
and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
and we all walked away from it, unscathed.
Chinese Ink Brush Painting
There are days when the mallards
slip under the oily surface
the way the eye’s glossy circle
welcomes light, the weapon’s reticle
burned onto your retinas
in a false negative
so that now you view everything
with hash marks denoting elevation,
lines superimposed over the nipple’s
aureole, the scapula with its play
of bone-articulated shadow.
It is how heavyweight paper
absorbs the fluid, the animal
shape, if not the animal itself.
Slender beaks stretch the skin
as you sleep. You open one eye, twist
the brush to disturb the trance, catch birds
shaking the cold from their feathers –
these larger birds of the shoreline,
bony knees above the water’s
surface, koi brushing shins
with curious whiskers, cat-like
insouciance, though the herons’ eyes
dart furtive into the cage-work of reeds,
where insurgents row a fishing boat