Table of Contents
Also by Christopher Merrill
Workbook (poems)
Outcroppings: John McPhee in the West (editor)
Fevers & Tides (poems)
The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature (editor)
From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon (editor, with Ellen Bradbury)
The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer (nonfiction)
Anxious Moments, prose poems by Aleš Debeljak (translator, with the author) Watch Fire (poems)
What Will Suffice: Contemporary American Poets on the Art of Poetry (editor, with Christopher Buckley)
The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee (nonfiction) The Forest of Speaking Trees: An Essay on Poetry
Your Final Pleasure: An Essay on Reading
The Four Questions of Melancholy: New and Selected Poems of Tomaž Šalamun (editor)
The Way to the Salt Marsh: A John Hay Reader (editor)
The City and the Child, poems by Aleš Debeljak (translator, with the author) Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars (nonfiction)
Brilliant Water (poems)
Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain (nonfiction)
Even Birds Leave the World: Selected Poems of Ji-woo Hwang (translator, with Won-Chung Kim)
Because of the Rain: A Selection of Korean Zen Poems (translator, with Won-Chung Kim)
Scale and Stairs: Selected Poems of Heeduk Ra (translator, with Won-Chung Kim)
7 Poets, 4 Days, 1 Poem (collaborative poem, with Marvin Bell, István László Geher, Ksenia Golubovich, Simone Inguanez, Tomaž Šalamun, and Dean Young)
Translucency: Selected Poems of Chankyung Sung (translator, with Won-Chung Kim)
for Sloan Harris
Terror is opportune as is relief from terror.
—Geoffrey Hill
PROLOGUE
I take my bearings on the Golan Heights, between an Israeli observation post and a UN peacekeeping base. Israel captured this strategic plateau in the Six Days’ War in 1967, and through the haze of an autumn afternoon, beyond a line of bunkers and a vineyard, I can see the road to Damascus, forty kilometers away. Beirut is a little farther off, over Mount Hermon—one of the sites traditionally ascribed to the Transfiguration, where Jesus appeared to his disciples in a new light. When Peter, James, and John saw their rabbi in a radiant white robe alongside the prophets Moses and Elijah, they recognized him as the Messiah. Out of a cloud came the voice of God: “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. Hear Him!” Jesus told his disciples to keep his metamorphosis secret until after he rose from the grave, then continued his ministry in the communities around the Sea of Galilee, at the base of the Golan Heights. It was there that he revealed his plan to build a church destined to reshape the course of history, first in the Roman Empire and then around the world—a religious movement that became inseparable from politics. It started with Jesus demanding a change of heart from his followers, and twenty centuries later I began to reflect on some of the changes wrought by another revolution in political thinking: the “war on terror” declared by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, DC.
Terror is always with us—a fact borne out by countless examples from daily life: the heart racing on a turbulent flight, the dread felt before the diagnosis is delivered. But a lookout on the Golan is a particularly good place to consider the consequences of living in fear. This is disputed land, in the sights of military planners and observers, politicians and diplomats, clerics and poets; and even on a quiet day it is hard to escape the sensation that all hell could break loose at any moment. Syrian claims on this land, which provides Israel with a crucial supply of fresh water, have for forty years added new threads to a tangled history, which periodically unravels in a spectacular fashion; hence the peacekeepers, more than a thousand strong, who patrol a zone of separation between the two countries, maintaining the cease-fire negotiated after Syria’s failed invasion
