She danced topless, the light-eyed drunken girl

who got up on the bow of our pleasure boat

last summer in the pretty French Mediterranean.

Above us rose the great grey starboard flank

of an aircraft carrier.  Sailors clustered

on the deck above, cheering, and the caps rained down,

a storm of insignia: S.S. Eisenhower.

I keep seeing the girl when I tell you

the Eisenhower’s now in the gulf, as if

the two are linked: the bare-breasted dancer

and a war about to be fought over oil.  Caps fell

on the bow and she plucked one up, set it rakishly

on her red hair.  In the introspective manner

of the very drunk, she tipped her face dreamily up,

wet her lips, an odalisque, her arms crossed akimbo

on the cap.  Someone, a family member, threw a shirt

over her and she shrugged it off, laughing, palms

fluttering about her nipples.  I tell you I barely knew

those people, but you, you liked the girl, you

liked the ship.  You like to fuck, you told me.

The sex of politics is its intimate divisive plural,

we, us, ours.  Who’s over there? you ask—not us.

Your pal is there, a flier stationed on a carrier.

He drops the jet shrieking on the deck.  Pitch dark:

he lowers the nose toward a floating strip of

lit ditto marks and descends.  Like writing haiku—

the narrator is a landscape.  A way of staying subjective

but humbling the perceiver: a pilot’s view.

When you write to your friend I guess that

there are no margins, you want him to see

everything you see and so transparent is

your kind bravado: he sees that too.  Maybe

he second-guesses your own desire to soar over

the sand ruins, sit yourself in the masked pit

and rise fifteen hundred screaming feet a minute

into an inaccessible shape: falcon, hawk—Isaa’s

blown petals?  Every headline contains haiku:

haiku contain headlines.  Reinvent war, then the woman’s

faithless, enslaved dance.  Reinvent sailors bawling

at the rail and one intoxicated trick turning in

the dazzling light.  Then the psyche re-inventing itself,

breaking the spell, reversing it: Caps on the waves, as if

they’d begun tossing away their uniforms, medals, stars.

See—I can make the girl wake up, dress, face west,

a lengthening, powerful figurehead: swept gold with fire.

I can make everything I thought indefensible change in the waves

of merciless light: the you, the me, the wars.  Here is the worst

of it, stripped, humiliated—or dancing on the high deck,

bully-faced, insatiable.  Here is the lie that loves us

as history personified, here’s the personification: O passionate

agitatrix, swearing to you this time I can make it right.