The News. Jeffrey Brown

while a rat watched

      all. Why bother to hide?

      La Saline: somewhere nearby

      the assaulted salted sea.

      Days later, the last light high

      in the Central Plateau so far so

      bone-crushed by the road (I’d

      argued against going), Saut d’Eau.

      They filled the benches

      and told us of death upon death.

      A man who’d lost his son:

      “I am a bird left without

      a branch to land on.”

Beirut

      “This is the family tradition: my father

      killed by his bodyguards, his father

      killed. They chose sides, chose right

      and then wrong and he who longs for

      the security of death in his bed must

      leave this country. My son knows this

      and his will too.” Within the same frame

      the eye deceives, meanings hide when

      you stand outside this history. What

      I’d thought was construction, a building

      with views toward the sea, on the rise,

      was its opposite, destruction: pockmarked,

      see-through, gun-wrecked Holiday Inn,

      monument against forgetting. Restaurants

      filled, kebabs on the grill, and on this day

      jets in Gaza, far to the south. In the south

      of this city, craters from other jets

      left, again, unfilled, while a billboard

      touts the Party of God. Permission

      required to aim the camera, granted by

      Hezbollah—watching us watching them

      watching them watching us, and all know

      who controls these streets. Later I walk the

      Corniche, in this Paris of the Middle East—

      was it ever so? Two decades of war—

      from Little Mountain: “We were looking

      for the sea.” Look again, so close, here!

      And there, can it be? The familiar choice

      of chocolate or glazed, no wrong or right.

      Hezbollah by day, Dunkin’ Donuts at night.

      Auden saw it in Brueghel’s Icarus:

      within the same frame, tragedy plus

      a girl eating ice cream, strawberry.

      This is what we encounter, too: memories

      that encompass craters and bombed hotels,

      faces red with hate at the jets overhead.

      But also the sound of the oud, the light

      in the park, nervous fathers watching for falls.

Joplin

      A staircase

      in an open field

      leading nowhere

      Scenes that make no

      sense—landmarks gone

      street signs lifted and flung

      into the next county

      Trees

      a gasp of breath

      so grim so beautiful

      Your own block

      looks like no block

      your own house

      no longer a house

      “The first thing

      I picked up

      in my parents’ yard

      was a pendulum

      then: Monopoly hotels

      a bullet