Robert Eastwood
My Way Back
Father, nothing wets the dust in Fallujah.
To them, I’m one of the booted men
strapped in khaki-colored steel, Hum-Vee
grumbling on its desert-whitened wheels.
They mill about me, about my belted body.
I hear mutters, but tell myself they own
the sand phantoms that whirl in the streets,
the colors that peel from a brutal sun,
the crumbled concrete, rust-rimed steel,
the hardscrabble shops & skewed walls, even
the scirocco that trundles tank-rutted roads.
I wish it were a place of lakes.
A place where a person never sinks.
Where brine brims your sides, skin lilts.
Where you can never sink. I remember once,
in a hazy distance on the Great Salt Lake,
you called over the water. Your tongue, bell-like.
You mouthed & pointed as I emerged encrusted,
held up your camera. When I smiled,
my lips cracked open the taste of the lake.
Here, always, smoke fills my nose.
Here, dark men squat in the sun
with mouths open, facing Mecca.
I see tongues in silhouette, broken teeth.
I feel assassination in the strange-tailed words
spread like dead vines across the walls.
Just sky would be a better place.
Sky, or in a watery-blue distance, a shore’s
lean finger wavering on the horizon––
a better place. Instead of dust, ancient water.
But I climb walls, father. Abutments bruise
my elbows. Forms crouch in alleyways.
All the bricks loosen. From afar come
the storm’s ominous thuds––car-bomb thunder.
Palms bend, mantled in ash. Fronds hide eyes.
If only I could float, father, cradled
on deep water. I’d lay back in the saltiness,
on that lake of ours. I’d never sink.
