from In the Gun Cabinet
This week in the PEN Poetry Series, PEN America features a poem by Mike Lala.
from In the Gun Cabinet
in the hospitality
of war
We left them their dead
as a gift
—Archilochos
When their bodies met the ground from one hundred & ten stories
ribbons unknotted
so old, they disintegrate (fine red mist) & curl up
into the day
•
into the day, the gun cabinet
you wake
the radio on the table, the airstrike
the first glass of water clean & gleaming
with sunlight
•
in the museums, the galleries, archives of a century
drawers whose mediating walls are rotting, that single image repeated
(I remember, somewhere, saving the front page because I thought it was worth something)
•
above
in that same light
streaming through the dust, the light
playing off your lips as they mime the arc
of the brushstroke’s blunt end
We left them their dead as a gift
•
in white paint
to remember us
•
and in the ponds broken off from the sky…
•
I
was
delicate
as a child
lived
one too
many lives, I
loved me as myself
I was my brother Last
I entered the gun cabinet I kept
forgetting who I was, what he wanted, which side
or surface I belonged to
•
in his despair, he drew the colors
independent, like letters from the same word [twenty
children dead &
not even the end of his magazine]
what work to be done then
•
when the birds falling right out of the sky
the sea mammals blind from the concussions
•
you place the glass down & begin your day, light
flecking off the surface, doubled & blinding
on the formica rose oh sheer contradiction
•
how will I
•
address it there is a moment from my childhood where my father lifted me
to straddle the 30-millimeter, hydraulically driven, seven-barreled Gatling cannon
on the nose of the plane he flew
my mother smiled & my younger brother looked up from her shoulders
in awe
there is a picture I remember
•
what is the value in making now I see how
will my work speak from its place to this
great violence shining white air trembling
white light
am I so seduced I believe
the time I spend
and what I produce
are untethered to the economy I live by
•
hand that raised I reflected the white flat
sea look around you
how you gaze beyond the gun cabinet
a birth water the better nation does it exist?
to an end, our winter
•
what parts of the story were you told dark evergreen
what parts
our seaming duration
do you remember what parts of the story
did you take to be your own
•
Our time here in the gun cabinet is limited
and yet there on the other shore
under the dark gaze of the oak
sun in your eyes you were there
•
brother, sister I never knew (here, within my question, you
you answered)
the other side
the other
dawn my half the other
birth
gone.
•
and yet you were
in the vast
time
[This excerpt from “In the Gun Cabinet” uses language (in italics) from several Cy Twombly paintings and sculptures, including Epitaph (1992); Untitled, a Painting in 9 Parts (1988); Analysis of the Rose as Sentimental Despair (1995); and Say Goodbye Catullus, to the Shores of Asia Minor (1994). These pieces quote from Archilochus, Rilke, Rumi, Catullus, and George Seferis, and include writing from Twombly himself. All are on permanent display at the Cy Twombly Gallery, the Menil Collection, Houston.]
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