Lines on Distance

She stepped into the tub at dawn and turned

on first the radio and then the tap.

The Predator operators of Nellis afb

have as much or more ptsd as pilots

who fly. Down the hall and oceans distant

I listened to her work to wash events

away as quickly as they accumulated.

A sort of race. I thought of where the soap

was going. Targets glowed on monitors

in the base’s trailers near Las Vegas

and operators in full flight suits drank

coffee from paper cups and adjusted

altitude as I stroked myself beneath

the blankets. I don’t like to take chances

and haven’t been to Vegas in years. The pilots

call people who run for cover, black sperm

writhing across their screens, “squirters.”

Near my finish line she tugged up the puckered

rubber no-slip safety mat. The sound should

remind you of a time a doctor took

hold of your arm for comfort or leverage

and tore the bandage off. If nothing like

this has happened to you, imagine it.

The haberdasher in Diderot who stole

his wife’s dowry (long story) plans to leave

Paris for Geneva, sensing distance

will make him less guilty. She wasn’t coming

back to bed. She may already have left.

Villagers call the drones, which make

a buzzing sound, “wasps.” The radio

reported to an empty room. “An assassin,”

writes Diderot, “if transported to the shores

of China, will lose sight of the corpse

he left bleeding on the banks of the Seine.”

Asia’s always such a great place to hide,

but Geneva’s obviously more convenient.

Say she expected her husband to return

from duty in a month. Would anything

we did between now and then make us

any more or less wretched than we were?

The drone returns to Bagram without

the missiles it left with and a soldier

restores its complement. Either his name

is Dan or else imagine that. And that

a cuckold’s rage can snuff a bomb. I came

into either a tissue or my fist. This was

weeks or months ago, and I can’t recall.

When de Castañeda and his men clambered

down into the Grand Canyon in 1540,

they found the boulders which had looked

as tall as a man from the rim in fact

stood taller than Seville’s La Giralda.

They must have marveled at distance’s power

to deceive and to wake deception’s twin, oblivion.

Their women and homes forgotten. You can’t

hear their screams from here, but they’re there.