Poets Against War continues the tradition of socially engaged poetry by creating venues for poetry as a voice against war, tyranny and oppression.
Tom Goff
47 years old
Carmichael CA
Published in such periodicals and anthologies as Poetry Now, Poetry Depth Quarterly, Clan of the Dog, Ekphrasis, Perihelion, American River Review, and The Sacramento Anthology: 100 Poems. First poetry collection, Field of the Cloth of Gold, forthcoming from Poet's Corner in Stockton.
Peace March for Martin Luther King
No one will rise again from Birmingham or Selma to command, Go forth and do this thing, yet we must go. Out the BART station exits we wriggle up, larvablind and light-lusting, from underearth. Up from the innards we rise for justice and peace.
Hope-starved as we are, we will march down Market Street, march spilling over the sidewalks of Market for the Iraqi powerless, for America’s unempowered. Rise, Dr. King, rise in your peace-hungry ghost, chant the world into starflow, pour us hot into the universe’s black billfold.
So many street signs, talismans of traffic and shove, legends of this-is-how-it-should-be. Do Not Block Intersection.
Today we have news for you, city: We are blocking the intersection.
What streets meet here? Is this Market and Beal? O’Farrell and Grant? RaceWar and Greed? We are blocking the intersection.
(The police, men and women, smile affable, but today’s holsters hold riot sticks.) Whole-hearted we mount our knifeless defiance. (But here it’s easy: would we walk so head-proud in gun-heavy Sacramento?) From a dozen signs Mohandas Gandhi bobs his nerveless cool smile of Ahimsa.
Pentagon, launch your planes with their JDAMs, your Blackhawks crammed with Delta Force. Wherever recklessness bonds with weapon, seething emotion with storm,
we conjure Dr. King’s gallant ghost against. We are blocking the intersection.
For Colin Powell
Sharp alike, the heavy or light provocations sting the reluctant wise warrior to rage aggrieved for his nation.
Even the grayest or whitest age succumbs, lusting to take chances, cut corners.
Where’s the realest risk run? There where the starry potential's to come, at the gun's blunter, hollower end,
there where birthing and greening are done
and once done, beyond mend.
Iraq
I was promised peace. The word hissed free of the seal between lip and ear: your soldiers were like good police,
they could tame Saddam’s mobs, transform Saddam’s debauched and terrible sons to carpet, bow down their brows to rug with lightning guns, with miracle weapons.
Of this there is no evidence.
I have seen the quiet neighborhoods flames bisected. Have you seen earthquake split a house the way a knife halves a pomegranate?
As the edge bares their chambers’ liquescent seeds, so the rooms lie open, burst urban caves pitiably naked to the eater’s, the sucker’s and swallower’s teeth.
With shame I have seen
our own guns spit death-seeds, red juice. I have seen a dog drink from a pool, lap the red juice, the scum oil and burnt fat.
Horrors I have seen more than equal your two thousand people made vapor in the towers.
We are the sand pounded into sandbags, held in only by our own burlap.
Stitched tight around our lives we split to the blade and empty down sighing.
Refitting the Belt
Today I strung for myself the bow of Odysseus. No, to be honest, I was refitting the belt of a vacuum cleaner.
Just as impossible to stretch and peg to the armature.
I wish all my wars domestic: benign quarrels a son living indoors has with peace implements.
Who needs the arrow I might shoot to whistle the gaps along axheads? He will not come back like Odysseus
from a second, lesser heart,
the muscle of pulse half atrophy ever since rage at the Department of Education
seized up his chest that midmorning. He will not come back from transparency as from a war, filling in the vacuum that’s filled these thirty years.
He did come back from one war. That was madness enough to return from, anger its residue. I’ve strung the belt to the detachable roller as to a stout bow. On now
with the vacuum. In its coarse roar I’ll suction up all this memory. Then go shake out the dust filter,
as one shakes out a soldier’s urn in a woods, emptying war like a contaminant into clean air.
Divination
It can’t be routine that draws us to the river, that holds us in thrall to the underflow of stones we clamber. We’ve come seeking the beaver lodge tucked into the bank, but sundown, the magus of cloud, upraises its red-gold palm, a conjurer who signals both “Stop” and “Watch” with the same high hand. We stand, our legs tuning-fork-struck, our noses as inquisitive to the wind as those of the dogs we keep lightly on leash. Your eyes add their lightness to the deep glow. Declaiming, you supertitle the cosmic opera: “The heavens rejoice over the fall of Saddam Hussein,” and we look up harder to verify your divination. If this is an Iraqi sky in Carmichael, that explains the costly heaviness in the hammer-beam gold roof, and how it happens the red translucence pierces mosque-like swashes of jasper and lapis and turquoise, each infinite stolen color-layer concealing each last contraband cloud-stratum. Everything broken or looted, the way “stuff happens” when evil dissolves and free people tighten their fingers in riot around loose objects, just to feel touch once more in their nerves. This December embraces our embrace, folds our hug in a breezy skein of silken chill. The sky’s distancing itself from all animal contact, as cloud-transcending bombers do, instruments faintly attuning to shocks they deal with an eerie near-ease. Your face absorbs the same delicate fleeting radiance the moon takes up in the red tint of an eclipse, or a pavement reflecting the multiple flaming pulsations of bomblets. Playing at our ankles, Cookie and Tippy snare us in a caduceus of leashes, able to topple us to the round stones in one duple Saddam-statue. Their leash-yank might be to remind us dogs live in this Iraq, that all moments are stolen acts of unconscious riot, and they like Bagdad must go home to sleep off a heedless freedom. Our creatures, unlike Iraq’s capital, won’t rise with a hurt head from the rubble consequence, that day-cancelling smoke.
Marines
They came to breathe life into our shaken incursion,
re-feather the haft of preëmptive war with plumes plucked in the blood
of a hundred hundred battlefronts. Tough as the grit that pummels in a sandblast,
they will billet in the enemy-laden civic center, diet on scraps of shellfire iron or spent uranium.
They’re said to leave no dead behind, to airlift every last loyal corpse’s each last honored particle
much as we bear away sheer memory from the peaceable decease, the drained glass husk of whoever was and held us with touchable hands.
We bless them as we cannot bless their cause, knowing that we too, town criers who so sorely ache to cry again our twelve-o’clock-midnight-and-all-is-at-peace
must first transgress into the strange heat and stranger heart, eat and drink from the unkind gutters we would so dearly avoid, wade the selfsame trash we pick from the rubble,
minister to perplexity left alive and good in the rotten city with hands we haven’t had time to cleanse of blood.
Abu Ghraib
A convenience store wouldn’t be this fluorescent. Behind the locked background gridwork, an eye-searing corridor tapers to a linoleum zero. Does that cell gate signify access to the even worse? But this is rogues’ gallery enough, and all of light. True, there are black notes: the MP’s black soft cap (part Mengele doctor-garb, part rappish do-rag); the wristband worn gauntlet-like below the blue glove cocking its thumb’s-up. His glasses; the grin under his mustache twizzle; his arms in their fold; all proclaim: I’m just the visiting obstetrician, and today’s just another baby slapped into life, a mother-bag sewn up.
In front of him crotch-high, a wide young smile of a woman, rampant over a field of nudes. Her face the face of a milkfed, temptress-in-cornsilk Kirsten Flagstad of a soldier. Clean even teeth widespread, as if caught bending with an apple basket for easy groundfalls. Her lady leer afloat over the mass, as if buttocks and apples alike were mere bites. Their self-wriggling struggle; and yet pulped of all will. What are they inside her mind’s contending hemispheres? Just a dogpile of doofuses…or…Arent’ they a tad bit like the blind pouches of sleep my blue-ribbon heifer might calve?
But these are men arrayed in the haystack, their clothes a dumped sheep-strew along the near wall. Camera-culled from the stew, these beef chunks: not because their doubled muscles are human, but for their tensile tone. Ground bass, plucking up an obligato from the captor’s loins. What mental counterpoint swarms in a mind under duress: what stinging guilt-notes, fear-notes?
I who in this sleepless icehouse lie naked and freakish, how under Allah did I become vegetable? Why this gravel tumbler in my bowels? Is it somehow my fault that I like a plant now embody both sexes inside, that I’m piled up with these others like something edible. My blind head garbage-bagged, tied tight as a Greek dolma: do they think me delicious in this ludicrous green, wrapped ready for my beheading in grape leaves?
Happy the Man Whose Stalwart Hummer Bludgeons
Happy the man whose stalwart Hummer bludgeons heroically into the liquor-store parking lot. The thing looks, with its teensy windows—purposely miniscule, for defense—its rounded undercarriage and useless-seeming tiny doors, like the offspring of a Well’s Fargo stagecoach put at stud to covering a Franklin stove. An undertaker would giggle over its bastardized hearse-like black. Now the hero dismounts from the behemoth, bedight in camouflage tee-shirt, black mules on his feet under dun-colored sweatpants. The man thin-haired, ample of paunch.
But who am I to judge? He has a limp, earned as if in long-ago combat; I let my draft number crumble in my wallet through high school, until the draft itself fell extinct. What is it that makes me deplore the ridiculous, oil-fed, deadly war we now fight, but lets others do the suffering? I marched arrest-free with the thousands in Justin Herman Plaza; never against the School of the Americas or into the blade of an Israeli bulldozer. I rested even this morning, perusing Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, admiring the man’s soft-spoken thoughtfulness: as if his very blood-soaked dream weren’t hounding him on everywhere in its pages, like Robert E. Lee’s spectre in the night battle, in those roasting silhouettes crying anguish against the flames of the Wilderness…
The Woman Who Wore Her Scarf for a Face
(In Lille, the world’s first successful facial transplant)
Inured to the R-rated, we more easily bear World War I after-footage, mute newsreels where spent doughboys uphold pieces of face,
jaw, chin, and brow prostheses made lorgnette cratering over the masquerades, lipless feasts of earsplit sorrow and waste. Once, Lille
cradled such heaps of before-during-and-after horror. Now a woman’s prodigal face is lost and found again, here in hospital. Doctors’
arrogant-tender fingers restore parts torn from her by a beloved animal. How she wore her surgical mask burqalike, airtight. Was it
oilskin she scarved around her in the rain? And, all over the world, do we not promise to give back the flesh we rip like tarp away,
keen over the very skin too long endeared for us not to siphon under? And it will be made whole, we urge upon her in a voice
like Jesus holding gently the hand we’ve withered yet swear to bring back jointed again and good. So now we painstakingly-givingly
cablestitch back the nerves, the vessels that fill up the rosy places able to grin and eat and say merci. Fifteen hours to compassionate,
depositing the icepack presents of a cadaver over a bone grid targeted by lasers. And oh how the blood once again courses blush through
the new face of her whose thanks are to swallow rejection medicine forever. As soon as permissible, she pats her cheeks at the mirror
with wonderment’s makeup, applies fresh whispers of love and fear: But is this face my life? Is this new woman anyplace like health?
Soldier's Home '06
She sees the array of faces on the tarmack, winter coats, rack-brown, that bud with flags. This is the closest she’ll get to a victory parade. So why does it feel so disemboweled, that pod-people crowd? Maybe it’s her; no need for ceramic plate under her pale desert cammies, but she feels breastless without. Look, somebody’s marker-penned crude signs with yellow ribbons that soften pink as she stares, the pink of blood in the rinse. No one to kiss her Welcome Home. Maybe that skinny young skycap over there… She conjures the avalanche of ticker tape, her hooking the dude and bending him Gumby-double, the way that sailor in the Times Square photo takes the young nurse’s neck in an elbow sickle on VJ Day. Nurse’s soft fist, camera-wards, projects, Ow, then OK, then Kiss me, big lug… And how about the way on that day, they’d copulate, unmet-before couples, in the dark doorways, and no more need be said by anybody? Hooah! But no, here he comes the ghost of Ray pushing his way to the front with the spirits of Ashley and Kyle. They sit on his tree-limb arms like crows; sun blackens them from behind. Don’t get stuck that way if you can help it: Hajjis in silhouette. More real to her than Ray are Sergeant Dwayne, Lance Corporal Susie Cue, P.F.C. Duvon. She’s back where Sunday means backyard corn on the cob, means Jesus Loves Me, This I Know, or Were You There When They Crucified? That pop, there on the tarmack, making her temples race… no, it’s just Grammy, snapping off her brand of IED—a digi-cam’s muzzle-flash… This soldier’s still stuck Iraqways as Ray kisses her, the smack to her mouth a resonant burst of fire.
On the Austerely Beautiful Cover of Mary Oliver’s Thirst
On the austerely beautiful cover of Mary Oliver’s Thirst, a silver photograph, suited to the tone of the book, by her partner Molly Malone Cook, now rendered up to death.
Photo of a road that narrows by the law of perspective, daylit, rainwet sigh of the sun into the infinite, trees, a black portion in the whole silver effect, at one side of the road.
A portion of Molly Malone Cook’s wisdom and skill translated into a silver gelatin print. And isn’t our passage into the far distant a silver gelatin print?and, when held in the eye of death, an afterimage
of our dealings in life, in soft or subtle or lurid color? And isn’t the death of a lover a silver truth, when all we lovers wanted was to leave our time gold-tinged,
edge-gilded, gold-saturated? But no time of war and warlords and starvation and children enslaved for soldiers can possibly deserve the flattery a golden age…not while
the Iraqi girl in the newspaper photo, no silver gelatin there, lies bedbound with her dear sweet face made a blister, while Darfur and Israel and Palestine and so many many
nations, each one the world to its people, anguish between fences of famine, anguish between barbed wire coils of rape and torture, anguish between borders of commodity and heedless unregard for the divinity,
the god-soul inside the hated other. Death can never be more than a silver story in a corroded, perhaps once golden world, and even the trees, in Molly Malone Cook’s consoling yet sorrowing photo,
stir perceptibly as we look, as if wishing to tell a more leaden tale of black…
Divine Wind
for James Lee Jobe
Ah, James, I admire your speaking, the speaking speech which is the living life, the words that flow with direct passion unmediated by objects except as the object must enter the message or the thought go unsaid. What object enters any message? Ink? paper? heart? I have no heart for the war, so my heart stops. As if by heart attack. My father’s heart attack; but what of that? He died early, but not so early. Born in 1913, he’d otherwise have died only now, perhaps; I count him one of the war dead; the war inflamed him. But he came through the war. Through his escort carrier’s cleaving by kamikaze, flight elevator run through a can opener. Yet his skin unsinged, fresh and available to his wife’s subsequent touch. That’s a miracle! No miracle for the ivory-cheeked young Japanese kid who plummeted and killed. Let this war unstop my heart, work loose my tongue, to say: No one should ever have to survive a war to emerge in this world still young, beautiful skin untouched by any weapon rougher than the wind. That other divine wind.
Daffodil Hill
(near Sutter Creek, California)
Calyx and corolla of yellow or white issuing in a trumpet corona: each sworded leaf-stalk lifts a war-bonnet impudent as a thrust curled tongue in butter or salmon or pure gold, one face in sheer thousands. Ephemeral little Arlington, one whole year to next spring’s reinforcement: daffodils their own living elegy. And the stars, the stars of the earth! ...how, how, how to forget them! Ah, Rilke, by June, the entire done-and-gone constellation’s an erasure lost as poet or soldier in summer’s blank trancelike heat.
Kruminjurs
On the drive to work, I toggle between NPR stations. What’ll it be? Morning Edition? Nope?a presidential press conference. The war. On the other? Classical. Anything good? Oh. A clarinet concerto by Bernhard Henrik Crusell, the greatest Finnish composer prior to Sibelius. While I’m on Nordic topics, Nora tells me the Latvian nickname for Bush is Kruminjurs?Shrub George. The little guy is enunciating extra careful for my fellow Americans, something about he hopes Congress will expeditiously consider. What’ll it be? Kruminjurs or Crusell? Crusell or Kruminjurs? Gee, what a dilemma. The clarinet player, kinda wooden, but the music kinda good: proto-Romantic, dark in the middle. I guess you can tell which NPR station I landed on, solving my driving-to-work problem, if none of the world’s.
Free Verse
for Nazik al-Malaika (1923-2007)
Iraqi woman, you spoke for the women. We have heard enough, lately, from the men.
You came to fame when Baghdad was “the Paris of the East”: how Eurocentric, should we not say
Paris, the Baghdad of the West? But today you died, creator of free verse in your tongue. Nazik al-Malaika,
you whose very name we’ll mix up, no doubt, with Nouri al-Maliki, a man, of a very different stripe.
I have read your poem “To Wash Disgrace,” and admire the way image filters like sun through its cold glass,
bringing insight into the rhythm of killing, the man murdering his sister or daughter for honor,
tearing apart a human life and calling it disgrace. There is a verse form for that tearing, it pounds
like syllables in the blood, it is a rigorous timekeeper. In your youthful poem, “The Cholera,” you wanted, not knowing
a prior example, the proper rhythm for the gallop of illness and suffering. This suffering has no motive, feels no lust,
so the rhythm clopped and clattered free in your mind: “So I tried following the rhythm of the horses’ trot.”
Nouri al-Maliki studied a different gait, not a clatter or clop or trot, but the lub-dup lub-dup of vengeance:
his heartbeat issued the orders that trained the police that kidnapped the woman. Sabrine al-Janabi endured the rape that brought
the anger that gave her the courage that spoke the truth. You would have admired the courage but broken the rhythm,
in our language an almost-blank verse, easy as leg irons. Listen to the pentameter in which we render Sabrine’s idiom:
By the light of the Prophet, I don’t do such things. And a retort, clinching the couplet, from the three policemen:
We take what we want, and what we don’t want, we kill. Nazik, maker of free verse, you urge us to fling off the burqa, the straitjacket,
the winding sheet, the misshapen scripture. To liberate women, free the whole universe of its mad, stabbing thoughts,
like the French doctor who threw open the asylums, let the inmates run free of the constricting rhythm.
Left Hand
Last night on the Arts Channel: a Russian woman pianist in St. Petersburg, 2003, plays Ravel’s Concerto For the Left Hand, careens through scales, leaping changes of fingering, thumbed glissandi. The composer’s own sleight-of-hand: deep bass passages conscript the sustaining pedal (illusion pedal?) for propaganda, dissemble a monstrous more and more. Passion in the insistence on one theme, each new permutation at cross-purposes with the last. Shall this blues be lament for the World War I dead, or (jazz apocalypso in muted trombone) the raw Big Bertha thunder of that war? Bemusements: what to do with the right hand? Shall it be a balancing prop, a clutch at the right keyboard corner to keep you from falling off the bench as you lean into the spiky treble? Or a napkin hand draped in your lap while the left spoons octave soup? The original performer, Paul Wittgenstein, squabbled with Ravel, whom he’d commissioned to write it; altered the key to slip in easier black notes, exhibited signs of PTSD; all consistent with his need for the piece, his right arm amputated in the Great War. The woman pianist now builds the cadenza’s despairing angry hive, left hand truly sinister, then finishes with the orchestra in one last grand swoosh, triumph and relief on her face, on the conductor’s and players’ faces. The audience (jaded oil moguls? Ex-Communist Party officials?) in strange apathy, as if they, not Wittgenstein, had lost something in a war.
Sheer Simple Brute Peace
So many years into the war, may we not wonder: how completely against our natures must we drive, push, implode to achieve peace? I watch, on TV, Cesar Millan (if ever a man-god worked among snapping teeth!), his weapons mere stance and serenity, play a beautiful brute like a marlin, the leash tossing as children might crack it in play-ocean swells across the floor. The German Shepherd struggles, his eyes twin fear-bulges; we fancy we see him sweat. Then the monster dog lies on his side beneath unalarmed hands, chest laboring. Now an enormous sigh heaves, deflates —a death-rattle: but only the death of rage, misplaced fear. Good dog. “Easy, if you’re a god” like the Dog Whisperer; but: good man, good woman—when, O when? Play us, O composite God, ill-perceived Force or Peace of the Universe, tug us on a taut line, dance us on your wildest whip of a cable above our petty blue atmosphere, starve us of whatever air, liquid, or solid feeds our reddest actions. Or simply let us suffer for what we’ve done through who we are: flint-chippers turned uranium-shapers. Too late now, unless you decree otherwise, to wish ourselves back to ugly dumb, fighting once again by flailing and landing not a fist around the oasis, until we submit gasping and spewing breath, emitting utterly stupid laughter in sheer release.
Letter to Najaf
April 2007
A march through a sovereign city in occupied Iraq: you tell us, in three green stars on a white field between stripes of red and black, “God is great.” We savor the consolation couched in the impassive wisdom-voice. We seem not to grasp what these thousands of flags also signal: Time to go now, you’ve done just about enough. Our eyes refuse vision’s own promptings, filter the transparently seen through ideal overlays: just like a parade! a spirited civic rally! And [forgive us the smugness:] They couldn’t have handled this four years ago. All along, you have been telling us: we have hundreds of thousands of people dead and wounded. We’ve seen the grim work of The Lancet, extrapolating from bloodstain into topsoil, sounding from the already wrecked down to the unexploded bomblets and glowing- with-half-life sewage water—you are right. We bear incalculable blame back with us home. You are not all civil war, you are Shi’ia, yes; but a Sunni cleric marches with you in Najaf. You can manage a night’s peace; a safe town market day, a basket brimming with fruit; a constitution. But will you really unite, will you ask us to help after we’ve left off hurting and helping? T.E. Lawrence envisioned you parted in three, along trade roads. What must we do, careless even of your name, its history: for all we can tell, “Iraq” means original city; strip of riverbank; date palm. Open your hearts to us, you labile, courageous, skeptical, devout, loving, remorseful, remorseless people we have wounded. If we cannot know, groping with the soft hands of those who disarm explosives, how your hearts rest nested inside ours, and ours nest reciprocally resting in yours, how can we learn never again to poke a stick into your land as into a hive, ignorant whether honey’s what comes, or hot-running wax, or that which issues in wing-angry multitudes, downfalls, outcries, in swift-slipping cataclysms of hum and sting, although human.
Cultural Speech
(for journalist Muntader al-Zaidi)
Cross-cultural comparisons are odious: manners look accidental, where we seek rule. War slides on its own slick scale: how low is opprobrious? What divorces the atrocity from the sad-but-cruel?
Like a lad in Shakespeare, shooting a second arrow to search for a first, an anguished Iraqi man flung his shoe at President Bush: the flight path narrow, the target broad, he re-executed the plan.
Americans feel no lingering shame or disgrace: The criminal garment’s a filthy white shirt thrice bleached. Absolution, a cycle that spins…how it rinses, renews…
Our mockery king of wars rests unimpeached. If law seems useless, cultural speech must suffice: Do like the Iraqi journalist—hurl both shoes!
For the Right of Ghosts
i.m. Dina Gottliebova Babbitt (1926-2009)
Dina Gottliebova, painter of Gypsies and Jewish folk
under the chimney shadows of Auschwitz.
To so many captive human lives a witness in watercolor, by the whim or joke
of Dr. Josef Mengele. A tinge of tan skin color in a portrait face,
for Mengele a record of unfitness to expunge or inject or breed out of the race.
What could Dina do? She could record. Could lock eyes and brush upon these and remember.
She could accept at the hand of the “Angel of Death” strange grace, survival for her and her mother.
What she could not accept, years later: witless liberalism’s wisdom, curatorially
intoning: Regrettably, these are not yours, although you painted them; you can come see them,
as anyone can; the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum, owns them, educationally, legally, historically.
Or else they belong to the heirs of Josef Mengele.
She sued for the paintings’ return, for the right of ghosts, still posed at her easel, to a last farewell and release. They remained in the museum’s clasp at her decease.
How many more such ghosts between us and peace…
A Just Quake
Would you feel moral or proud deciding to earthquake a city? Pick a Lisbon, pick a Ciudad de Mèxico, a Port-au-Prince—would you go to the Pope or the Presbytery for dispensation, for the right to conduct holy earthquake? Would you refer to the articles of the Geneva or Hague Convention, the legal doctrines of Grotius or Aquinas of Hippo, just to claim the privilege of conducting a just temblor? If you’ve taken any or all of these measures, don’t hesitate, don’t prevaricate, do it now: reach deep with godlike hands beyond loam and stone to the superheated magmas and masses of rock down low, swirl them, scrape them, dash them together, and let the smoky dust waft from the broken houses, the impromptu jagged tombs, all silence over splintered limbs, save only a few wails and screams aloft, and the uplift hairs on the backs of ribcage dogs.
