Truck

Jon Woodson

The Battle of the Archers

you don’t even stand up in your day,

you shift your stance, winding from

foot to foot, making yourself low

and slight, trying to slip around what

they loose at you, the spare darts they

will allow, their recompense. some

pull takes away the weakness of the eye.

they are dancing in the line of the ridge

with the orb of the sun at their backs.

they are taunting with their songs and

twanging with their taut bowstrings.

we know them, they are our cousins

or something more distant. more distant

now. they have teeth on their darts—

white and sharp. not really teeth—

more like voices with dangerous words,

pretty things that put you in pain

if you listen. there is no magic, only

that string of gut that takes on the strength

of the bow. they will not stand there long.

they are thirsty. they are tired. they want.

they want to drive at us and to know our flocks.

you don’t stand up in your day. you crouch

and you bend so that you appear

to be dancing if anyone is fooled

by appearances, but you are making

yourself into a bird or a sidewinder,

anything but a friend or a brother.

nothing is more kindly than a dead man,

he gives you everything that he has.

he smiles as he lies down to surrender

his flocks, his stream of water,

his weapons, his magic up under the cliff.

you don’t even stand up in your day

unless you want to lie down

in that shadow and never stop giving things away.

John Rawls at Hiroshima

Hiroshima by moonlight was clinical and lunar

and secure enough, if not civilized.

Subsequent heavy rainfall, then persistent showers,

had washed away some of the residual radioactivity.

Records indicate that troops occasionally

patrolled the destroyed area of the city.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some lengthier form of campaign.

Arriving autonomously by jeep, the ignorant vehicle

driven by autonomous driver, universal

implications were at rare intervals lopsided in the landscape;

little was rational or reasonable.

The approximate perimeters of total destruction from blast and fire,

like everything showing, demanded an equal indifference.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some other regime of fairness and flame.

There were contours of long-term danger and shame

that suggested we keep this field of imperfection

to sit in while making our pitiless picks in the future.

Death makes us uncomfortable, desolation

makes us want to rebuild, to veil

what abstraction reveals in the muster of frays.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some other plan of disintegration.

The mistake is plain. The bare-persons are gone,

and they ought to be here,

but not in the way that they are shadowed now.

The jeep idles, the intractable night is full of potential.

He will drive off and defend the good,

placing life between the pillars of slavery and the atom.

Everyone else is better off than they would have been

under some other average utilitarianism.

[Harvard University professor John Rawls, a leading figure in moral and political philosophy, was the author of The Theory of Justice.]

Aviation in August

Over the bay the C 130 banked like an osprey
coming down for a strike
at the surface. The tide was ambiguous, and I thought
of some Frost—neither out far nor in deep: research
supports the idea that most thinking 
is a recombination of previous thoughts. No troops
birthed from the slow body, no spiders on wind-threads,
no dandelion fluff. Just flight practice. Around. Around.The perfectionist OCD of war. No waves today, 
and pebbles underfoot. Then an apache gunship lines along 
obsessively, and from my companion
I get a monologue on the logic of wanting
to be a door gunner. To be able to have the danger
in your wallet like a credit card with 
some fantastic limit—if you don’t get
shot out of the sky. It’s a dead language going across
the sky and meaning nothing here “at home,”
the only grammar apparent, a young girl stuffing 
an overdetermind breast into the flimsy chute.

Why I Am Not on the Money

I have heard that Oprah Winfrey

is on the kwacha in Malawi

I have heard that Madonna

is on the pula in Botswana

I have heard that Kanye West

is on the dirham in the Emirates

I have heard that Paul Anka

is on the rupee in Sri Lanka

I have heard that Cher

is on the franc in Niger

I have heard that George Clooney

is on the franc in Djibouti

I have heard that Justin Bieber

is on the franc in French Polynesia

I have heard that Beyonce

is on the krone in Norway

I have heard that Barak Obama

is on the florin in Suriname

I have heard that Mick Jagger

is on the franc in Madagascar

I have heard that Scarlet Johansen

is on the manx in the isle of Man

I have heard that Tiger Woods

is on the dollar in the Solomon Islands

I have heard that Steven Spielberg

is on the som in Kyrgzstan

I have heard that John Bon Jovi

is on the lira in the Holy See

I have heard that Lady Gaga

is on the pa’anga in Tonga

I have heard that Leonardo DiCaprio

is on the loti in Lesotho

I have heard that Angelina Jolie

is on the lira in Italy

Why I Am Not an Ice Dancer

The things that I reject are the things that define me.

I know the popular wisdom says

that we should be shaped by what we embrace,

but they just say that to get the word embrace

into the room. I am not going to go around

embracing anything. In fact, if I go around

it will be because the world is undetectably circulating

and I am fixed up so that I go around

even though I am lying in my bed perfectly still

trying to wait until the vertigo passes.

The part that disturbs me is the habit

the ice dancers have of going in reverse

before they do something colossal. Who wants

to back up to the crisis, or play turn about

with the moment of truth? Like the sky divers,

I want to go at things head first, joining

hands with the other Icaruses and then lighting

those flares, so that we make trails kiting

the whole way down. All the ice dancers make

are ugly scratches on the ice, by the way.

So, there’s another heartfelt demerit set

in my black book of estimations. Now ballet

fakes weightlessness with feathery clothes

and fragile women on their toes, but truly

falling weightlessly to the ground

is pure and simple and realistic. Which reminds

me of the sentimentality of water ballet—

half in, half out, need I say more? Buy hey,

I know it’s hard. I know it sounds like sour grapes.

Ice dancing. It’s just that it’s philosophically inadequate.

Why I Am Not a Woman

I am not a woman because

I am a massive brooding humpback

of testosterone ice hurtling

out of intergalactic insolence

zooming toward collision

with the Earth on a trail of vodka

and optimism at twenty

or thirty times the speed

of child support.

All the way down the path

of my descent,

I knew my destiny.

All the way along the curve

of my trajectory

I had a sense of my

ultimate purpose.

But then I was confronted

and I had to stand up

before the thermal

intake window of forasmuch.

When I couldn’t make up

my mind, I slapped a stack

of credit cards down on the counter

and requested all three

moral bypass operations.

Why I Am Quiet and Keep to Myself

Nikola Tesla was quiet and kept to himself
Walt Whitman was quiet and kept to himself
John Lennon was quiet and kept to himself
Ralph Waldo Emerson was quiet and kept to himself
Thomas Edison was quiet and kept to himself
Karl Marx was quiet and kept to himself
Mikhail Kalashnikov was quiet and kept to himself
J. Robert Oppenheimer was quiet and kept to himself
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was quiet and kept to himself
Charles Baudelaire was quiet and kept to himself
Vincent Willem van Gogh was quiet and kept to himself
Alexander Fleming was quiet and kept to himself
Ray Bradbury was quiet and kept to himself
James Baldwin was quiet and kept to himself
Ramana Maharshi was quiet and kept to himself
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was quiet and kept to himself
Wernher von Braun was quiet and kept to himself
Walt Disney was quiet and kept to himself
Samuel Clemens was quiet and kept to himself
Daniel Boone was quiet and kept to himself
Roger Williams was quiet and kept to himself
Joshua Slocum was quiet and kept to himself
David Livingstone was quiet and kept to himself