Rubaiyat by Lawrence Joseph

Rubaiyat

The holes burned in the night.

Holes you can look through and see

the stump of a leg, a bloody

bandage, flies on the gauze; a pulled-up

satellite image of a major

military target, a 3-D journey

into a landscape of hills and valleys . . .

All of it from real-world data.

Zoom in close enough—the shadows

of statues, the swimming pools of palaces . . .

closer—a garden of palm trees,

oranges and lemons. chickens, sheep;

a map being sketched on a scrap

of paper; a fist coming down firmly

on the table; a tray with a dish

of lamb, and a bowl of rice and pine nuts.

Yes, that's it. I've become

too clear-sighted—the mechanics of power

are too transparent. Yes, that's

precisely it. The creation

of a deep-down pit, a slag heap

of broken masonry, of twisted metal,

a persistent ringing noise from inside

as if thousands of telephones have been

left off the hook. Did you notice that?

The Pentagon's "Military Diaries

Project," soldiers starring in their own

war movies, training digital cameras

on themselves—a child is put

in a wheelbarrow after stepping on a mine.

Politics? Personified. His head

permanently cocked, he is attended

by a team of physicians

and an electronic-implant engineer.

He hopes he'll be able to confer

with the Shah of Iran in Cairo. "Dead?

The Shah? Really? No one's said a thing

to me about it," his response to the response

of a diplomatic press correspondent.

Poetry's not what's made impossible

by it—laughter is. Is it even

farce?—the translator, for example, who,

because of threats, is wearing a bulletproof

vest and a large pair of army goggles

for disguise, the sniper who slides

a condom over the muzzle of his gun

 to keep the sand out. I try to get

the chronology straight . . . I look

out on the harbor, in the blue light.

I type into my machine. Perhaps

a glance at the newspaper. I listen

closely and I don't listen at all . . .

How complicated do you think the geopolitical

background behind all of this is? Brains

uprooted and warped, the logic's

schizophrenic. What's that again? A poem,

a speech, of lament, a threnody.

A poem of thoughts, of consequences.

Time flows, is flowing, forward and back.

I lift a spoon, my hand is trembling. How many

corpses are counted and for what reasons?

That's what was said. The captured are blinded

except one blinded in one eye only

will lead the others back. What? War

as a living text? Cyberwar and permanent

war, Third Wave War, neocortical war,

Sixth Generation War, Fourth Epoch

War, pure war and war of computers

to process it, systems

to represent it, war of myth

and metaphor, of trope and assent,

war of hundreds of millions of televisions

assuring it, hundreds of billions

of dollars, a PK machine gun or two, a few

gunmen you can hire cheap, with their own

Kalashnikovs. Now . . . what now?

I want you to watch carefully

what I am saying now—are you

with me? An inch-long piece of steel,

part of the artillery shell's

casing, sliced through the right eye

into his brain, severely damaging

the optic nerve of his left eye,

spraying bone splinters

into the brain, making him quick to lose

his temper, so acutely sensitive to pain

the skin on his face hurts

when wind blows against it . . .