What Is (War)

By Joanna Klink

And if all those who meet or even

hear of you become witness to what you are—

a white country of blight beneath the last snows of

spring. Could we remain quiet on earth

and bear it, the war we make inside

what is—it’s a long time to be here, to be still,

to feel the rot inside now—bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars

at the edge of a field where we are once again

taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,

witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,

each birdsong or siren extinguished where some

trueness abides, some portion we have lost our right

to claim or know. It comes into any mind that would

perceive it, leaf-rot, speech-rot, the deliberate ribcage

of the deer, these abrupt chalk cliffs over which

the confused animals fling themselves, and you,

obscure, receive no response that is not suffered

as the days grow long and distortions

come to seem the natural course of things—

what trees whose creatures stray into space—

and they find they cannot land though the eyelid

struggles open—no answer, no resolution—

a window opened to the mute green world,

weedy and driftless, a wind drilling rain, dirt,

the parameters of uncertainty, of hope,

what we might be against what we have done,

bees crawling through the lips of the one

who would say the earth turned into sour flesh—

What strange rooms, what soundless movement of sky

over desert where the flesh again is beaten

and the emptiness extends itself while some old man

looks on, a raptor in waiting, the sand-field

around them blown thinly toward sun—no longer

ourselves in the afternoons, evenings,

weak, vague, clutched at the mouth—

because we did nothing, because we lost count.

Source: Raptus (Penguin Books, 2010)