The Winning Poem by Susan Tichy

ICE OR SALT

…but everything personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.  – W.B. Yeats

1.

Tapestry makes a landscape without depth. I copied that, but it came out death.
St. George appears to be kneeling to the dragon.

A box made of burned wood, lined with very thin metal.
It’s Friday morning, Mozart on one side of the glass, a siren on the other.

The lens slides over an aerial photograph. Country or not. Success if.
Tank body rotates on a factory floor.

He says: you can drop human skulls down a stairwell to test the bone.
No laws, except it must not exorcise the ghost.

Heat of the bomb fused her arm to her chest: fire as some man designed it.
But the only ballad I know about dragons is one long joke about spears and caves.

Bombers so high they could not be seen. They could not be seen,
So they made a hammock of their scarves and carried her.

A tank at the gates, its cannon leveled up and the hatches down.
That photograph is a reenactment, photograph no more actual than words.

When she asked how he knew that bone she found was once a possum’s jaw
He said, ‘I grew up in this world.’

Soldiers with water strapped to their backs and guns velcroed to their thighs.
The words streets of Faluga, or the words multi-thrusting army, paradise, begin.



2.

At the center of the canvas, two travelers have turned their backs,
And we are meant to look with them at what they are looking toward.

Flock of crows on a frozen lake: the sweet is dark, the dark is sweet.
But let me whisper in your other ear, O sky black with bombers.

He fell on an ordinary day: dry rock, a Wednesday. If this were a ballad,
I would tie my hair round his middle waist and rhyme would carry him home.

She says, ‘I don’t think of the past.’ What she means is that they carried her
For twenty-seven days through mountains.

House finches sing from the telephone wires,
And house finches sing from the tips of the ocotillo.

Our life between the wars, I say—my one great nostalgia.
She sat straight up in the middle of the night and looked at herself in the mirror.

Black H’mong men passed out on the sidewalks around the open markets.
Walk-around-the-knife-fights-don’t-smile says my guide.

This morning I listened to Robert Plant play electric guitar in the desert.
I think this means ‘the pen is more important than the page.’

Half-circles of snow in the shade of rocks. Bird tracks here, on this one.
Cops say, just bury your clothes for a while, it cures the stench of death.



3.

In the ballad, yarrow does not quite rhyme with sorrow.
You leave the door not open but ajar.

In the mountains of Afghanistan, he told me, the light is just like home.
Woodsmoke to keep the bugs away, and wind makes even the short grasses shine.

In Faluga, soldiers go crazy: on-board computers and puncture-proof tires.
‘Hayride through a combat zone and none of them showed any fear.’

It’s another ordinary day: silver prose and photographs, orgies and gladiators.
A mallard stands puzzled at the edge of a swimming pool.

‘Now that’s all over, the hell with it, 50 square miles of Tokyo burned.’
It’s reel-to-reel tape but the voice doesn’t seem to explain.

At home in our town, I was his wife. I was the mountain climber’s wife.
Our grandmothers pounded yellow dye into white war margarine.

This bold knight had a gay broadsword, a gay broadsword had he. And discharge papers and a shaved head, and new brown shoes untouched beside the bed.

In field recordings, you hear dogs barking, people talking,
The singer breathing in between the words.

With one hand she strikes a match on a brick, lights the stove, pours the tea,
It’s Friday morning. No, look at the paper, babe—it’s Saturday afternoon.



4.

Methinks the hawk, when chased by songbirds, doth protest too much.
My desk is hard and flat and made of wood.

Lens slides over the photograph, and this is what I am looking for:
A bullet cradled in a bath towel, a pocket of air under an overturned boat.

In Faluga they had to fight on the ground. Guitar strings nylon, gut, steel.
Barbed wire strung at the height of a child and another man done gone.

So how do you know it’s not a ballad? How do you know what happened
happened here?
The chopper crew that brought him down said ravens took his lunch, but not his eyes.

It’s another Wednesday. In an aspen grove a single leaf goes down, down, down,
into plenty,
But a dog barks behind the glass and the squirrels all run.

You can look it up in a rhyming dictionary:
The words threat level, the words decibel, fantasist, farewell.

In the camps, they took all scarves, all belts and ties,
So those who had survived that far would have to survive farther.

It’s what they mean by a soft mouth: the dog picked up a dropped tomato
And carried it into the house without breaking the skin.

Dark with bombers? Not at all. The sky is clean. The fire is. Was.
Look, she says, my diary—it is just a list of words.