My friend Daniel, in his military career, spent two nights in an Israeli prison for attempting to buy guns on the black market, as he’d been tasked to do by his Special Forces unit.
There are other things, worse things, that happened to Daniel beyond the weapons market. And as much as I like this poem that makes me think about him, it isn’t so good in the middle part: it hectors, Daniel would have said. That stuff about the American death, blue uniforms, barrels, hands: too easy, facile, and the title as well. Cheap, almost.
The Al Harishma Weapons Market
At midnight, steel shutters
slide down tight. Feral cats slink
in the periphery of the streetlamp’s
dim cone of light. Inside, like a musician
swaddling a silver-plated trumpet,
Akbar wraps an AK-47 in cloth.
Grease guns, pistols, RPGs —
he slides them all under the countertop.
Black marketeer or insurgent —
an American death puts food on the table,
more cash than most men earn in an entire year.
He won’t let himself think of his childhood friends —
those who wear the blue uniforms
which bring death, dying from barrels
he may have oiled in his own hands.
Akbar stirs the chai,
then carries his sleeping four-year-old,
Habib, to bed under glow-in-the-dark
stars arranged on the ceiling. Late at night
when gunfire frightens them both,
Habib cries for his father, who tells him
It’s just the drums, a new music,
and the tracery of lights in the sky
he retraces on the ceiling, showing the boy
how each bright star travels
from this dark place, to the other.
And then there’s that ending, with the stars. That wasn’t Daniel’s ending, but I want to hope that maybe it was his sister’s. He worried about her, about her boyfriends, about their parents. Worried about whether she was pregnant.
Daniel never caught a break. He ate a bullet in a New Mexico hotel room.
[Edited after the fact: the poem is by former Sergeant Brian Turner, from his exceptional collection, Here, Bullet.]
I don’t know how I feel about that middle part–something about having a passage pointed out before I read it makes me notice it too much in reading the poem. So I will say what I do like, which is the continuing sense of being closed in to a place and a psychological mind-set–even the stars Akbar talks of are inside his place, not the real ones in the sky. The title may not be exactly what you want, but there is an interesting contrast of the image of a market, which I picture happening in daylight, with a lot of life and tumble around it, with this dark, secretive, midnight place. Is this a poem that you want to work on, or does its purpose lie in the memories it evokes in you now? I can only imagine what it must have felt to lose a good friend in the way that he died. Cyberhug to you, Mike.
In school, we read Toi Derricotte’s Tender, which carries with it explicit instructions about how to read it. I was the one student in the class who completely ignored the instructions. I think also about the wonderful authorial instructions at the beginning of Pale Fire. I admit, it’s rude of me to foreground the poem with my feelings about it, but I don’t think my critique takes much away from the power of its opening and that breathtaking, heart-hitching close. And that close is where I feel Daniel, who was a poet as well, and whose poetry many of his peers refused to understand:
from this dark place, to the other.
So I’m grateful to Brian Turner for making me think of Daniel again.
Ahhhh. I had a student give me a poem and an mp3 link last month–he said that in order to experience his project (mythology course–poem), I had to listen while I read. Cool, I thought. Cool, it was.
Your critique only made me think that you’d written the poem. Sounds like an interesting anthology–who published it?
I don’t know why Daniel is so much on my mind lately. Anxieties about the job, maybe, and thinking about my grad school cohort. More of a concern, perhaps, is the fact that I had three cadets from last semester waiting outside my office today when I came back from teaching, waiting to pick up their portfolios and stop and chat a bit, and they’re going to be leading platoons in Iraq or Afghanistan in a few years. And that’s why Turner’s invocation — “Here, Bullet” — compels, fascinates, terrifies.
The publisher is Alice James Books. I could have been more moderate in my language responding to that middle section: it’s an incredible, breathtaking collection, and I was looking too hard for things to critique. He gave a talk here at WP last semester and I’m frustrated that I missed him. By all means, check it out: I’d be curious to hear what you think of it.