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| jared smith |  | 1. As Death Comes to Many This is the way tragedies begin. Lights blink out in the middle of town. Doorways fall open. Birds’ eyes become Christmas ornaments, brittle. Internet domains have no dominion. Blue bottle flies are gathering out beyond the cotton swabs. Shamans are setting up camp beneath the church bell towers. The rag man comes at dawn. A scent stronger than sex draws us, the way tragedies begin. Lights blink out, become Christmas ornaments, brittle beneath the church bell towers. The rag man comes at dawn over all he has collected in his sterile needles. Darkness is out beyond the cotton swabs, the blue bottles of desert glass empty of fine-boned fingers that plied each cask, each flask containing your name and only that. 2. My Father’s War, Again Germans knew everything about change, and nothing about things that didn’t change. One year they liquefied a season’s potato crop for oil to run their trucks and tanks. Perfect scientists, they ground lenses for high altitude surveillance, froze farmers in their fields like our satellites, magnified the shadows defining each of us, learning to motivate machinery, cash in on what it was to be defeated, to be a small country recovering from being crushed, and we took to that like rats, being back-home boys ourselves growing grain while empires fell. It takes a while to see this, a few years, I guess. We’ve tried since to measure it in our businesses and seize military efficiencies to meet our needs. But I live in what was a farmhouse before the war. Searching photographs from before I was born, I see the church tower still standing on Main Street Square and that Pete’s Warehouse was once the depot where trains carried green container cans one day and grain the next and grain inside the green cans another day. And the people, looking up from under wing-tipped collars, staring forever into the camera’s lens of measurement; their own lens of the eye, the cornea, the hole into the soul opening into the black tunnel that comes back upon itself. It’s other things than static measurement that make us men, they seem to say, and there are times that do not change. | |
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