Intimate Geography
('Operation Iraqi Freedom')
It felt odd from the start, this war.
At the start, the 'death' of Saddam
when Baghdad was bombed, but
he's not dead, a bizarre
Zapata,
and then the Scuds fired at Kuwait
but they weren't Scuds,
the 'chemical weapons of mass destruction
factory', with earth banks and barbed wire
which wasn't one, however,
and the 'column of tanks destroyed leaving Basra'
which was three tanks,
the endless 'securing' of towns and cities
which aren't secure
even allowing for the distinction
that 'secure' does not mean 'safe',
the 'Uprising' in Basra
which no one could find there...
Once
there were poems in inverted commas, this
is a war of inverted commas. Once
I wrote that 'poems about poems
don't seem as abstract as they once did'
(although you don't need quotes, quoting
yourself) and the Oxford Companion decided
this meant I was no longer being abstract, when
in fact I meant that poems about poems
(in that case partly a child)
are not abstract because the abstract
in them works through to a deeper real. Will
this war work through to the deeper real
at last? Now it seems again, however,
that it feels odd, this war. I have paid it
careful attention for almost a fortnight and what
I would note here is that singular oddness
of feeling it evokes: one is always
at a tangent to it somehow, albeit
with despair's edgy wit. The deaths
have black solidity, as if from method, no
white napalm suddenness...I thought: is it
farce encoring tragedy, but there
is too much earnest passion in the evil,
and one watches that eros like watching
spiders breed: 'It is what they do on this planet,'
as a child's science fiction exercise
might observe. Spiders feed in street windows
broken by children's bones flying, but
the US polls say yes: who want this so much.
Who know what they do and also that
they want those inverted commas, George-
Bush-as-by-George-Orwell. Is the US
need for war not 'a way to teach Americans
geography' as Bierce is often quoted, but
a greed for abstractions: for the abstract, rather,
not met by food or sex or fashion, by
any intimate geography but this? But then
the abstract is not the inverted commas,
either, and it is those they want: the quotes
which in two days will expire,
the world
left gasping with winded logic, the new
skulls on dresses in the marketplace,
damp empty dusty shoes. Günter Grass called
this a 'wanted war' and perhaps that desire
accounts for the oddncss of feeling: the animal
impossibility of communication. In a damp
concrete corner in the market, one's self-sense
crouches close, alert for friendly fire.
Copyright Credit: Jennifer Maiden, "Intimate Geography" from Intimate Geography: Selected Poems, 1991-2010. Copyright © 2012 by Jennifer Maiden. Reprinted by permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd.
Source: Intimate Geography: Selected Poems, 1991-2010 (Bloodaxe Books, 2012)