Carrie Etter

THREE POEMS

The Occupation of Iraq

Wounds under plaster or gauze are not wounds
to the beholder. These early daffodils come to bloom
and die in four days. The trick is to lose well,
which is not the same thing as losing profoundly,
not always. The swaddled wound appears already
on its way to recovery; it must, to preserve the pallor
of the bandage, have been washed clean, loose skin
trimmed. The idea was to fill the flat with buds
and leave for France. When does loss become
a media event? No bodily injury produces more pain
than that to the nerve, yet the eye cannot perceive it.
We left for France. What's the relationship
between how loss is reported and the number of people
who identify with the victors? The dentist
overfilled the canal, sent the sealant six millimetres
into the lingual nerve, delivered six hectares of misery.
On the first night, someone said Canadienne when I feared
Américaine, and I smiled. Winning comes with
a dictionary, all the right words without rules for syntax.
There is no exponent to relate my worst pain
to an entire country's wounds. We came back
from France, and the room was yellow with dying.
All we could see was loss.

 

Divining for Starters (36)

in the death-wish, in the end of beginnings
the river placid with cold, oh I know winter
the broken stalks, a field of parched stumps
what volition in seasons, in renewal
the wind at its coarsening, at the mill
into the core, whose arrested depth
the hard ache of it, into or against which
or wait, the dull grievous wait

 

Divining for Starters (42)

from those barefoot days
a plateau in retrospect and occasionally in that time
someone's suburban pastoral, which is to say
the unbroken membrane of it
no one suspecting, no one heeding
acres of overgrown field
a strangely domestic elixir
snapping the pods off the vine and eating the peas raw
blithely someone's daughters
crest and crouch again


Copyright © Carrie Etter, 2007.

Carrie Etter's poems in this issue come from a manuscript in progress, Divining for Starters, which will appear from Shearsman in 2010. Her first colection, The Tethers will be published by Seren in June 2009. She lives in Bradford-on-Avon, teaches at Bath Spa University, and enjoys blogging.