The Soldier's War Elegy (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

The dreaded moment comes
And it cannot but stun and muddle one’s notions
Of sufficiency and one’s notions of purpose and direction
What purpose does it serve to see and feel keenly
The something which keeps it where it is
And makes it what it is and fills it with the tension
That is common to all that is living and bright and opaque alike?
This something pierces through shell and rock
It pierces through the oak’s rings of walls
It’s gripped itself about the thorny stems of gorse
And its yellow flowers up in wind swept hillsides
And bluffs with the sea booming below it
And above it the mammoth heavens with mammoth clouds
Turning all light from green and blue and ash-grey
Into the impenetrable darkness of the beginning of time
That must have been there all along
This movement of light and sound and the gaping void
That can’t be but the alpha and beta and omega
Cracking through and moving violently
And assuming shape and meaning over the heaving land and sea
Imposing transcendence and asserting distances
As the language of memory and the language of the invisible
Secreted and pressed into crevices and under mountains of ice
Where it was forgotten and given up as irretrievable
It was given up as mythical and useless
It was relinquished as the music and dance of the Aurora Borealis
To what end yep to what end yep to what end yep to what end yep
To what end yep to what end yep to what end yep
A parenthetical comfort a parenthetical affirmation
Parenthetical always parenthetical for all that drumming and neighing
And moaning and sighing and hoping and praying and expecting
And it’s to be again and again a parenthetical comfort for all that
where none’s called for and none expected
A man’s sigh is his doubt and his affirmation and his obfuscation
And his lying and cheating and scheming and plotting
A man sighs in his sleeps and recalls it not in the morning
The bird jabbers incessantly and the dog barks and the horse neighs
The pig squeals and the man does his nodding and snorting
What’s the use of hearing inside one’s head
A voice that warns one to keep away
A voice that signals when and where one should turn and look?
What’s the use of going out into the rain
To feel what can’t be felt but in the rain?
And one retreats and retreats and feels a wordless anguish
Piercing where nothing else is found but must be the heart
If it is the heart that’s got inside it a world without words


2

One retreats because there’s nowhere else to go
One goes back and keeps moving and plans a type of future
A future that isn’t what it might have been otherwise
Had one not gone as far away as the remotest frontiers
And what should one be dreaming up and pondering
At such outposts and who is guarding such places
And what languages should one have mastered before coming?
Soldiers are unknown soldiers who perish fighting inexplicable wars
Soldiers are adolescent boys and girls shouting into the wind
Weeping and pleading and lying and cheating
As the sea breaks and swells and fills the air with knives
And as the night populates its spaces and sounds with memories
With dead and buried and unloved and unremembered men and women
There is a sea that may or may not have a name
Where the dead sing songs in peculiar languages
And bang drums and dance when the moon is gone
And fly in and out of caves and when they’re dull
And quiet it’s time for the dead to hide inside trees
And inside large rocks and otherwise bury themselves
Under peach and apple and pear trees knotted into place
With roots and the decomposing carcasses of rats and birds
And sometimes the dead adorn themselves with worms
And crab shells and long sheets of wet kelp and squid
And in winter the dead can be alone and forgotten
And the night sky or the moon no longer belongs to them
And because they’re waiting the dead then can sing
And pretend that the lives they’d fashioned and lived
Never happened and what takes up their time now
Is watching black mushrooms and shiny tin pots
Raining copiously from the heavens
And the ground fills with weird sounds and swells and cracks
This is a place for forlorn soldiers to visit and watch and describe
In long and short verses and long and short letters and postcards
This is a place for the unrepentant Sissy to meet her soldier
And fuck for hours against a tree and wait for a midnight kiss
And a promise of a love everlasting
Which she shan’t hear this night or the night after
This is a place where the soldier is a poet
And where the poet having once been a soldier
Was once himself a sailor and a carpenter and a geographer
The soldier was once himself a priest and a monk and a librarian
And a butcher and a monumental mason and a gravedigger
And a bank-robber and a killer and rapist and a window-cleaner
He’s been a guard in a skyscraper and a filing clerk and a cabbie
He’s been a mountain climber and a surfer and janitor
He’s been a soldier above everything else he’s been that
And now he’s turned to poetry because he can’t understand
What has happened to him and what’s changed him
What has altered and distanced and erased his comrades-in-arms
Who lived and died beside him and are now dispersed
And invisible and unaccounted for as soldiers who’d seen war are
He’s turned to words to fashion something from what he sees
From what he sees from a great distance from what he saw from a bridge
From what he saw from across a field in the darkest night
And the longest day it’s the anguish trapped in his body
It’s the anguish trapped in his head and fixed in his eyes
It’s the premonition he experienced again and again firing his rifle
That has turned against him
Words alone may be the means of placating the invisible
The sole means of strapping reasons and explanations
To what slowly turns and evolves to what is a morass
Of images and worries and weeks of death-filled days and nights
Of groping one’s way towards the slow flickering of the dawn
And waiting to see what type of life awaits
It’s one more day yes another day is what the soldier tells himself
Another day and another chance to get out alive
And when the war is over then what?
After the war comes the retreat which isn't the first retreat
The world isn’t what it was so it’s to words the soldier turns
For solace and direction and he turns to them
As one may turn to prayer in penance and desolation
The soldier’s despondency can’t be rendered easily into words
What is he to gain from writing what he writes?
What he reconstructs cannot be relived
All of it’s over and gone and he isn’t the person he was
He’s alone in a room filled to bursting with ghosts
And he's screamed and swore and reproached himself
For returning marked and changed but he’s made it back
He’s returned and finds himself now in this room full of ghosts
And so he admonishes himself for the dullard
And drunk and impractical (nearly useless) man he is
He's cursed and swore at himself and wept through one hundred nights


3

Words aren’t what they appear to be
Words are breath and they’re silence
The soldier has returned with paper and pen and drawing implements
And this time he’s ready to gamble away his soul
This time he’s willing to bargain for the key and it’s a key
Which opens the gates to his God’s heart
And for this key the soldier is willing to be exiled (thief that he is)
He pleads and lies and promises and swears
Again and again never to return he says
That he’s willing to be exiled from among his family
From among his friends and neighbors and the world he loves


4

And having foresworn all else in his life the soldier is allowed
But one promise and one secret and it’s his bargain
When it is sealed that both go to the grave with him



© J. Noya, 2006