What Comes Home
“Were you free then all along, Jim, free at last….” Adrienne Rich, from Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib (1968)
The vanishing point where your bodies appear,
A desert horizon where nothing but light comes
Into being. I sit with two letters, one from a
Journalist and another from a soldier, overcome
With the heat and the violence. “We killed 137 people
And a dog,” B writes, “all but the dog had it coming
To them.” From Jim: “A picture is a way to structure suffering;
You cannot capture it but you can keep reality from coming
Apart.” Last night on the South Side I saw a body slumped
In the back seat of a police car as two cops waved the oncoming
Traffic to pass on by. I let the scene pass. The horizon
Where I see both your hands aiming a camera and a gun comes
To almost seem identical: bodies fall into line, seized
By acts of capture. I move on in ways so unencumbered
By the weights of your discoveries. Jim, I do not
Know where you body is buried. I cannot come
To terms with this. In the same way I cannot unsee B drive
The aimless hours into the dark: bodies that cannot come
Home. I hold your two letters the way I hold my two
Countries in my heart: what we must and will never overcome.
On Grace
It’s from a 90s flick, this black, graceful
Bag blowing all grande jete to arabesque among
The blunt rush of cars, breathing with the grace
Of a beggar, or the dry, October leaves
Swept from their branches, even as the graceful
First flakes of snow still lay behind a blue weight
Of sky. I get why we are asked to love the graceful
Lung-soft stretches of plastic: they are accidents
Of beauty, metaphors for the excess of feeling that grace
Our days: the chance encounter, a stranger filling their
Mouth with your own, the fall between steps, the ungraced
way we find ourselves suddenly lost and yet asked, by no one,
To speak, turn, and dance, as if grace
Is just a performance to make others feel whole:
Our silence as a dead friend gracelessly
Ages through dozens of lonely afternoons,
Blown between cars, behind chairs, saying grace
At quickly eaten dinners, the failure of winter
light to cheat cold of its bite: we drift, blown by the wind in the grace
Of our own making, lit from within, weightless and un-ending.
Benjamin Balthaser is associate professor of multi-ethnic US literature at Indiana University, South Bend. His poetry collection on Jewish victims of the Red Scare, Dedication, appeared from Partisan Press in 2011, and his monograph, Anti-Imperialist Modernism, appeared from University of Michigan Press in 2016. His critical and creative work has also appeared in journals such as Massachusetts Review, Minnesota Review, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He and Jim Foley (to whom his poems in this issue are dedicated) were classmates at the UMass-Amherst MFA program from 1999 to 2002.