Mothers Over Nangarhar. Pamela Hart

      INTRODUCTION

      A poem, by its very nature, is an ancillary and obsessive thing. Were the state a ship, as Horace put it to us in his odes, then a poem, political or not, would be the wake of that ship, impossible without it, doggedly pursuing it—a thing apart and yet integral. To live a life without poetry is to look out from the ship on which we cross the short sea of our existence and see the water unmoved, untroubled, untouched, and to think nothing of it, the sea slick and without sound. No one would ever confuse a ship with the parting water that pursues it, and yet a ship without its wake, like a wake without its ship, would be a ghost ship, a sign of death-in-life, a form of terror.

      Mothers Over Nangarhar speaks back to the world while being deeply aware of its own nature in this wakeful way, aware of the strange and haunting paradox of having given life to the world that encircles it and having also been brought to life by that same world, the paradox of being in the middle of a war without being on the ground, the imagination brimming in the wake of the ship of state. The book circles its subject with the poignant uncertainty of whether it is merely observing or being dragged down into the depths. These are poems that move like liquid, pursuing what has been lost in those distanced decisions as life turned a corner and bent out of sight, that move with a foreboding sense of an approaching but unconfirmed shipwreck, having passed cindered flotsam in the sand.

      The deft use of craft in Mothers Over Nangarhar, with its admirable range of influence, allusion, and form, doesn’t paper over the collection’s sense of its own ancillary and obsessive nature. At its heart this book is a story of the mother’s mind making sense of a child tossed overboard and into the jaws of war. How does the mind make sense of this—the nightmare of your child being chewed and spat out by Scylla and Charybdis and then sent back to you? How does the body make sense of this—by seeking communion with nature and art and others, or through the search for virtual knowledge?

      Somewhere between theory and therapy but free of the constraints of both, Mothers Over Nangarhar moves through its mazy, crazed world of intimate and global conflict, exterior and interior pain, searching and assured. It is a beautiful, strong, and vulnerable work for our beautiful, strong, and increasingly vulnerable world.

      —Rowan Ricardo Phillips

      June 2017

      MOTHERS OVER NANGARHAR

      WAR PARTITA

      Dear one

      From the yard I see Mars

      While you keep watch in far-off deserts

      I check the world clock

      Looking for the force of cluster

      I recon the conflict

      Secure the day’s perimeter

      Tripwire my better angels

      Oh you of frenzied armor

      Carve this song

      Into your bullet

      CITIES & SIGNS & WAR

      If all cities are Venice and all Venice is memory then where will you be deployed. Will you see Venice in Kabul. Their architectures spreading across arid plain and narrow canal. There you go. You may walk and walk and not notice anything real and when you do see something maybe you’ll know that thing as a sign of another thing. Here you are. Your M4 over your shoulder. Marco Polo tells Khan the streets are written pages; the city says everything. But you are reading an unruly discourse. It may have nothing or everything to do with the city of your deployment. Your face burns as it hunts. The signs are signs of other things. What do I as your mother know of this. Nothing.

RIVER OF PAINTED ROCKS

      Along the Chattahoochee we walk. Men fish in its muddy shoals. Also cormorants. Pelicans sun in a river of painted rocks. I’m proud. It’s the marching. The uniform. The order. Heat oozes. Fish break the cinnamon surface. I notice your eyelashes. How dark. You were a blond baby. Now you are a soldier. You have an Adam’s apple I see. Your skin is clear. I hear my father saying your skin is clear. I talk to him for a very long time in the parking lot of the Red Barn Restaurant. It’s our last lunch. I don’t know this then. See how the mind is torn from topic to topic. We don’t visit Carson McCullers’s home. She married a soldier from Fort Benning. Its stucco houses, the red-tiled roofs. You liked to paint. You were not an artist. There’s no rushing mountain stream to this story.

WAR GAMES

      In a photograph posted online plastic soldiers crouch behind switchbacks of sand and twigs. Several lie sideways in the dirt, like helpless turtles. Miniature paper flags flutter near the enemy’s berm. Elsewhere a mustard-yellow cowboy idles, his hat hanging off the back of his head as the pistol is fired. His target is decked out in headdress and chaps, rifle in one hand and bow in the other. My son’s first gun was a dinosaur.

FLYNN’S POND

      My pregnant belly

      your small torso

      below the pond’s skin

      us drifting

      in an overcast day

      the pond itself floating

      like a ceramic boat

      in the middle of the world

      surfaces unmarked by breeze

      or the scar of us

      the water’s desire for our bodies

      our want for its glassy touch

      you’re

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