Committee Regarding Debriefing Kin
After that our only recourse was to prune our reasons,
a step I’ve never enjoyed, it’s kin to assessing tenderness
in the gut, wounds within the sinews, the rad abs
that could scrub clothes clean, grate cheese, when taut
pitch back a flipped coin. Also how they knew a bed
in the service was made. That’s what the letters left
to us assert, every kid strongly encouraged to write,
they do handle tools of significant reach, & bullet
& letter sound like kin. Wielded well, they both surprise
& can’t be answered. As in this case. The way one knows
one’s actions are selfless enough that medals hiss your name
in a forge vs. when one’s a pussy is what the cadets
attempt to explain from their theater seats by acclamation.
If the knife goes in you’ve failed. Should the bullet fall
in his heart, you pull an all-nighter to study telemetry only
resembling hunting zombies, guitar heroics, or hell,
air hockey for all the oak leaves care. R&R & hand-eye
coordination are kin. Our philosophy of sea, air, & land
holds that the rubber block belongs on the pool deck
if it’s delivered by a young man whose bound feet
don’t prevent him from textbook attention. Hidden
within reports of meals is lemon testimony to earning
one’s ease, that it’s kin to running down an impala
or penning an op-ed everyone forwards, a version of thanks
for saying the thing I didn’t. Perhaps your account
articulated for me what I felt but couldn’t express
in the bathysphere of myself, which bobs obviously
most days on the surface with a stuck escape hatch.
There have been entire Thanksgivings at which
the chance to touch the urn never seemed to occur.
The folded flag is under glass, kin to a diamond heist,
the thrill the laser alarms will be severed or a retina scan
urgently requested. Don’t compare your fingerprints.
Develop these skillsets the way one packs on muscle
like equipment, should your workspace prove fatal
it can revert to a weight the postal service will flat-rate.
Gravity is a rainbow you’re an anchor for, the flyboys
who returned you your default appreciation society.
They have to refract the frequencies carrying grief
& rhetoric from an atmosphere rife with chatter,
that asks that fire be returned toward foes & friends
& next of kin out back who bum my smokes
& start each sentence with man, or brother, & end
with periods left by cigars stubbed in biceps, faces
asterisks to mimic whatever happened to you out there.
| W. M. Lobko |
|
levelheaded: Committee Regarding Debriefing Kin
This poem’s title comes to us in a kind of legalese. Its meaning becomes very specific – literally a committee for debriefing next of kin of military casualties – but initially and out-of-context it’s so official and abstract it nears meaninglessness, belying the poem’s deep emotion. Such is the case with many of the poem’s turns-of-phrase. The poem disguises real things behind abstracted bits of language, drawing out weirdness from already weird words and lines. “[G]uitar heroics” stands in for Guitar Hero. Metonymic “oak leaves” stand in for decorated or highly ranked soldiers. “[T]he rad abs / that could scrub clothes clean” is clearly an unfolding of the phrase “washboard abs.” “Gravity is a rainbow” recalls Gravity’s Rainbow, and so on.
The speaker’s reticence makes sense considering the emotional difficulty of the poem’s interrelated scenes. (It’s easier to be on the authoritative “committee regarding debriefing kin” than to be “some guy who tells another guy’s mom her son is dead.”) The speaker’s role in these interrelated scenarios – the notification of next-of-kin, the letters written home, the glimmer of a funeral – is not perfectly clear. Is he the next-of-kin? Is he the debriefer? The lines “& next of kin out back who bum my smokes // & start each sentence with man, or brother” lean us toward the latter possibility, but part of the point rests in the idea that it is very difficult and deeply emotional for both parties, that they can’t be separated into parts. Still, it would be the debriefer who hides behind official language, who is expected to maintain a sort of professionalism despite the genuine horror he’s tasked with revealing.
For all the speaker’s concealment, it is clear real things are happening. We jump right in with “After that our only recourse was to prune our reasons,” after which we ask, “After what?” Well, after the “debriefing” most likely, but what’s important is that the harder stuff – reckoning with death and the memories of “whatever happened to you out there” – happens “after” the debriefing. The poem courses through a series of memories until it arrives at the lines “There have been entire Thanksgivings at which / the chance to touch the urn never seemed to occur,” and it begins to shift away from nostalgia toward a crystallized, deeper sadness. This sadness is tempered (concealed?) by a bit of black humor with the lines “should your workplace prove fatal / it can revert to a weight the postal service will flat-rate,” but overall the second half of the poem funnels us to the poem’s final image, the image of men “with periods left by cigars stubbed in biceps, faces / asterisks to mimic whatever happened to you out there.” In that image we see a kind of self-immolation in miniature, an emotional response hidden behind literal scars. Suddenly it’s not only the speaker who jukes and dodges, but anyone who’s experienced sadness.
– The Editors
