A Target

Don’t call me that other name,
that time-warp you folded me into
with your Movie-Tone death.

The stress lines in black and white, the crackle of speakers:
These brave lads aren’t coming home.

Near its source in eastern Turkey, the Euphrates appears to run uphill
where a bloody Kurdish child tries to eat the orange
I have given her in the rubble of her home.

When I awake above the Atlantic, my wife is gone, so I walk the isle
whispering her name above the hiss of engines until the door to the cockpit
opens and I see her there under the arm of the pilot.

Dear Mother,

He talks in his sleep and prays to your god he never believed in.
Last night he told a man he called Lucas to step down from the tractor and fight.
This morning after we made love he corrected my grammar again.

She got the rug with royal blue crosses framed in tan
that they bought at the covered market in Ankara.
He got the samovar
that they found in the shops of Erzurum
with an airman from the American missal base.
How much is that in real money?

The camera pans back from a fogged, green mountaintop,
and the music builds as he holds her there dying on eight wide-screen TVs
up against the wall
of a Target.

Across the aisle, more screens with talking heads:

Those who seek their other in pornography
may find their lives as viable as the tumor
behind the ear to which they hold their cell.