Gunshots in Another Language
(cf. Tarkovsky’s Stalker)
Richly decaying walls,
rich textured light through decaying still-thick muslin,
walls thick as a keep’s, thicker
than a man by three, their interiors entirely cratered
with expansive sepia blisters
as if celluloid had filmed everything, then burnt
away, clinging; even the river-ice-
thin door, its wood grain light under
the mottled crazing, looks over-recorded, a breathing derived
of something which itself was never alive.
Everywhere, even where no shadow settles, is shadow.
Three of us lonely, silence
and one backpack. Have to go.
It has been intimate, this abandon
to flight, this getting-to-know-you
zone around the zone
we’ve circled so quietly.
What waits there, past
the imbricate fence
the guards’ guns
duck and rise before as they stare
out the back of their barrack-trucks
at the evacuated buildings, one
of which we are crouching through, crepuscular
corpuscles of a breathless machine
dreaming sunlight? A gap
when they whisper, our opening.
Have to go.
Through walls diffuse and far lights
near-black our footsteps’ strokes strike
trees, puddles, fallen windows, boxes, cannot return
to tell us where the traps are, blank killing
spaces of crushing inward pressures.
What tools can do, they will do
to get us past: the rest is
How easy
words come here, where no words
have before, have no names
which know them yet. Only growth
remains: factories flooded
of meaning, railcars inert of it, trees burst
through roofs. What could we
have come for? What intent
to retrieve
when we can carry so little?
A kind of home at last, let us make picnic
of this house’s field, its anosmiac
flowers. The brown river flouts past
paths it won’t take, under a curtain of mist.
No sound escapes its periphery,
no names walk its edges, they’ve collapsed
to the bellies of bugs and a milkweed field
resolving out of the fog or the fog
out of it and the sun not yet
arriving is a shooting star retelling itself
burning itself away.
Nothing knows itself where its names
can do it for them. Let that can go, petrol
is useless here.
Look, the car, the overgrown
weeds and timothy—no, not through it:
weapons in the shapes of fingers
held to the light and
their men decaying
into birds’ nests, who
belonged to them? Over-machined
nuts tied to freshly-torn cloud-pale muslin
strips which flow like the wind they contour
when thrown will test for normal,
resistant ground. That’s where we can
walk, that’s where the crush inward
we can’t move through can’t hide. Past this sharp ridge
is where the camera never moves, and
neither does the muslin. Quick,
Just as it’s supposed to be
between us, around this puddle
central to this final room, this perimeter
the alien gravity nestles to, does not threaten.
Unbarred by light or wall, impenetrable to keeping,
the water drips, envelops each intrusion.
There’s always a new confusion
to be avoided, always the muddle
these ripplings make of our faces; always our waking
tomorrow to the same walls
everywhere and our lonely walk together
outside of them, along the exhausted river
still mysterious as the words it once was were,
behind the apartments, down by the ancient factories.
___________________
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Stuart Greenhouse is the author of the chapbook “What Remains” (Poetry Society of America), and the recipient of a 2014 New Jersey State Council of the Arts grant. New poems are recently out in Denver Quarterly and Diagram.