Station Zed Read Online Free Page A

mosquitoes
    drifting in my room. The power hadn’t come back on,
    the air was completely still, and overhead the sun
    passed behind the moon—everything in motion
    uneasy as clouds shifting. I imagined on
    the road the sound of different footsteps,
    slap of sandals, leather soles’ soft creak, the sun
    dissolving in its own corona in its arc
    across the continent to blaze out above ships
    plowing through the Indian Ocean while millions
    of shoes on the tarmac walk and walk to work.

KM4
1/ THE MOUTH
    Not English Somali Italian French the mouth
    blown open in the Toyota battle wagon at KM4
    speaks in a language never heard before.
    Not the Absolute Speaker of the News,
    not crisis chatter’s famine/flame,
    the mouth blown open at KM4
    speaks in a language never heard before.
    Speaks back to the dead at KM4,
    old men in macawis , beards dyed with henna,
    the women wearing blue jeans under black chadors .
    Nothing solved or resolved, exactly as they were,
    the old wars still flickering in the auras round their faces,
    the mouth of smoke at KM4
    mouths syllables of smoke never heard before.
2/ THE CONCERT
    Lake water
    in smooth still sun moves in
    and out of synch
    with the violin
    playing at the villa—
    the bow attacking the strings looks like a hand
    making some frantic motion to come closer, go away—
    it’s hard to say what’s being said,
    who’s being summoned from the dead,
    from red sand drifting
    across the sheen of the shining floor.
    The pianist’s hands taking wing to hover above a chord
    become the flight path
    of a marabou stork crashing down
    on carrion, the piano levitating up and up
    above red sand that it starts to float across
    the way a camel’s humps
    far off in the mirage rise and fall fall and rise
    until mirage overbrims itself
    and everything into its shimmering disappears.
    And the ones who died the day before,
    blown up at the crossroads at KM4,
    scanning the notice board for scholarship results,
    put their fingers to their names as the onlookers applaud.
3/ ORACLE
    The little man carved out of bone
    shouts something to the world the world can’t hear.
    All around him the roads, lost in drifted, deep red sand,
    die out in sun just clearing the plain.
    Dried out, faded, he makes an invocation at an altar:
    an AK-47 stood up on its butt end in a pile of rock.
    The AK talks the talk of what guns talk—
    not rage or death or clichés of killing,
    but specs of what it means to be fired off in the air.
    No fear when it jams, no enemy running away,
    no feeling like a river overflowing in a cloudburst—
    forget all that: the little man of bone is not the streaming head
    of the rivergod roaring at Achilles; nor dead Patroclos
    complaining in a dream how Achilles has forgotten him.
    The AK wants to tell a different truth—
    a truth ungarbled that is so obvious
    no one could possibly mistake its meaning.
    If you look down the cyclops-eye of the barrel
    what you’ll see is a boy with trousers
    rolled above his ankles.
    You’ll see a mouth of bone moving in syllables
    that have the rapid-fire clarity
    of a weapon that can fire 600 rounds a minute.
4/ “BEFORE HE BLEW HIMSELF UP, HE LIKED TO PLAY AT GAMES WITH OTHER YOUTHS.”
    And there, among the dead, appearing beside your tent flap,
    at your elbow in the mess hall,
    waiting to use, or just leaving, the showers and latrine,
    the boy with his trousers rolled appears
    like an afterimage burned into an antique computer screen,
    haunting whatever the cursor tries to track.
    So he liked to play at games with other youths?
    The English has the slightly
    too-formal sound of someone
    being poured through the sieve of another language.
    Syllable after syllable
    piling up and up until the boy,
    buried to the neck,
    slowly vanishes into overtones that are and are not his.
    As if he were a solid melting to liquid turning to gas feeding a flame.
5/ TIME TO FORGET
    There’s a camel a goat a sandal left in red sand.
    Over there’s a water tower, under that’s