Sand Opera

Philip Metres

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781938584237
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

" Sand Opera is what political poetry must be like today in our age of seemingly permanent war."—Mark Nowak

Sand Opera emerges from the dizzying position of being named but unheard as an Arab American and out of the parallel sense of seeing Arabs named and silenced since 9/11. Polyvocal poems, arias, and redacted text speak for the unheard. Philip Metres exposes our common humanity while investigating the dehumanizing perils of war and its lasting effect on our culture.

From "Hung Lyres":

@

When the bombs fell, she could barely raise
her pendulous head, wept shrapnel

until her mother capped the fire
with her breast. She teetered

on the highwire of herself. She
lay down & the armies retreated, never

showing their backs. When she unlatched
from the breast, the planes took off again.

Stubborn stars refused to fall...

Philip Metres has written a number of books and chapbooks, most recently A Concordance of Leaves (Diode, 2013), abu ghraib arias (Flying Guillotine, 2011), To See the Earth (Cleveland State, 2008), and Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941 (University of Iowa, 2007). His work has appeared widely, including in Best American Poetry, and has garnered two NEA fellowships, the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, four Ohio Arts Council Grants, the Anne Halley Prize, the Arab American Book Award, and the Cleveland Arts Prize. He teaches at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Breathing Together

Bear with me. I want to explain why it took so long, the strange and hard ways this mss. hit me. Weeks ago, a close friend who worked for the State Department killed himself, apparently leaping from the Taft Bridge. It was shocking, but also unbelievable—truly, we did not believe it at first. P— was in no way suicidal. He and I had had a conversation where he scoffed at those who ended their lives. He’d seen a lot of godawful things, had interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors, and felt it was his duty to bear witness. No obit was released for a long time, the family wasn’t talking, and no police reports of a suicide on that day. I tracked down that the news came through a woman who had been staying with P—. It sounds like a conspiracy movie, but on the day of his death, two federal officers came to the apartment at 6 am and interviewed him privately for an hour. She was asked to leave. When she returned, the officers confiscated P—’s home computer. They made plans for dinner, and he left for work—the last anyone saw him. P— had been interviewing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and detainees. He was a research phenom, intensely moral—self-righteously so. Perhaps he stumbled onto information he shouldn’t have and was considering releasing it….We’re all being cautious about how we talk about this. You don’t have to say anything back about it, but I wanted you to know a little of the story.

When I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child, I Said to My Dad

Saint Paul was a jackass, my father muttered,

keystroking his tank into position in The Mother

of All Tank Battles. I turned back to the screen,

maneuvering pixilated tanks. Each arrow key

altered trajectory, each cursor tap a tank blast. Fast-

forward two decades: in a cubicle outside Vegas,

Jonah joysticks his Predator above Afghanistan,

drone jockey hovering above a house on computer screen.

He knows someone’s inside. Is it his target? Who else

inside—cooking, crawling—will not outrun his digital will?

He is cross hairs and shaking frame. Stone implosion.

He watches the collapse replay on-screen, then

heads home. Pizza. Diaper rash. Removes a thumb

from his toddler’s sleeping mouth. Again, no sleep.… Our game’s

quaintly obsolete. On mailboxes around our neighborhood,

our beagle would sign his line of piss, which said: it’s good

to be alive and eating meat. He was adding to the map

our eyes can’t see, nor throats can speak. Our shield and our help

at Great Lakes Naval Base, my father imagined permutations

of disaster. We were Region Five. Coordinates run,

scenarios conceived, New Madrid fault lines, the possible

flood of Des Plaines, a tornado’s blinding spiral

rolling its dozer across the plain. No preparing for it,

just to pick up what remained. If a nuclear bomb hit

Chicago, the epicenter here, he’d draw concentric circles

radiating, a pebble disturbing the mirror of a lake. Each circle

meant a slower death. Between us and them, the Wall

was a mirror reflecting us and nothing beyond. The whole

world was what the mirror hung upon. He showed me how

to hold a blade, how to watch my reflection for every nick, how

to cut my face without bleeding. I bled. I hooked my glasses

over teenaged ears. Outside, the blur of lawn became grass,

each blade stabbing upward to light. I thought I knew

we see as through a glass, darkly.… My frames have narrowed

to lenses eye-sized. My myopia grows. To see

what’s happening, I open a laptop, lean into...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Contents
• Illumination of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew
• I. abu ghraib arias
• II. first recitative
• III. hung lyres
• IV. second recitative
• V. homefront/removes
• Compline
• Notes