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Overview
You’ve got to put your pants on in the house of fact.
And in the house of fact, when you take off your shirt,
you can hear your shirt cry out, Facts are the floor, facts are how you make the right side talk to the left.
I’m washing my naked belly clean, and doing it with dignity.
I’m turning around, trying to see the filthiness
that keeps making me filthy.
—from “House of Fact, House of Ruin”
“I hate to admit it, but even the house of fact is a house of ruin,” writes Tom Sleigh in the title sequence of this extraordinary new collection. Very much of our present moment, in which fact can so easily be manufactured and ruin so easily achieved by pressing "Send" or pulling a trigger, these poems range across the landscapes of contemporary experience. Whether a militia in Libya or a military base in Baghdad, a shantytown in East Africa or an opulent mall on Long Island, these subjects and locations resonate with the psychic and social costs of having let the genie of war, famine, and climate change out of the lamp in the first place. The book ultimately turns on conundrums of selfhood and self-estrangement in which Sleigh urges us toward a different realm, where we might achieve the freedom of spirit to step outside our own circumstances, however imperfectly, and look at ourselves as other, as unfamiliar, as strange. House of Fact, House of Ruin is Sleigh’s most engaging and virtuosic collection to date.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555977979 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2018 |
| Pages: | 120 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
PART ONE
Three Wishes
Down the side of a yellow plastic soap dish, struggling in soap muck, one of those tiny black ants that can find a crack in the invisible flees from the AK of my shadow, and looks about to spring into the unparted Red Sea of scum and froth that slimes its feelers as it rubs and rubs its body like a tarnished lamp with a genie inside waiting to pour out in a cloud of diesel-smoke from the refineries in Basra before resolving into a human shape of fire:
could the ant be a sultan bewitched into the body of an ant? Is that why I hear it say,
My sultan stares at its bewitched body like body armor it can't take off reflected in the shallow sea inside the soap dish.
But now my sultan staggers as if drugged,
First wish: to keep away the Annihilator.
1
Lizards
In the desert the lizard is the only liquid flowing under rocks and
the Desert Fox's Tiger Tanks whose engines make the noises recorded from the stars, a whine oscillating underneath the motors' revving, a whine only the lizard can hear.
Artillery fire floating above the clouds of Benghazi, thum thum
Is this who we are when we strip off our body armor which, as we pile it in the rack, looks more vulnerable than our
the pullets with their heads hidden under wings,
what I saw in the still, flat eyes of the lizards: they had that calm,
the axe-handles ... the arrow that comes out on the far side of time where the island, drifting, swims up through lightning, then sinks back down into ocean green:
in the deep's primal war room maps unroll themselves,
entwining and rippling like two lizards chasing each other over rock,
For a Libyan Militia Member
1
Once I cleared the chopper's wapwapwap
and smelled scorched concrete wafting from shellholes in the runway. Then, we were speeding along in the back of an open truck,
its axles shuddering over hardpan as I rubbernecked at burned-out tanks, turrets blown to the roadside seeming somehow sadder than the men who died.
2
Just a boy who played soccer until the revolution,
the radio broadcasting endless hero/victim chatter sent him racing behind a wall, hiding from the sniper's crosshairs —
where he suffered as much from boredom as his wound.
head down, his bandaged cheek, crisscrossed with tape, looking like it aches. The hot breeze dries sweat from his face as the lizard whiplashes loose, scrambling
across the sheet to disappear under the bed,
in the boy's fingers as he laughs and, swinging it around, shows it to his mother frowning,
3
Each time the boy, grown-up now, is forced to flash ID, his scar tissue's calligraphy writes on his body the history of his own scalloped, twisted flesh shrugging off my pose of objectivity:
shrinking, puckering, the skin grafts on his burns shine white as phosphorus in the sun:
into a grin or frown, as year by year whatever's written there gets that much harder to decipher,
4
In shade and sunlight the lizard grows a new tail that writes in dust over a broken cobble its slithering trail until it stops short, heart pulsing in its throat,
a notebook, scribbles green and brown skin, broken black diamonds arranged in vertical stripes, claws that look like hands of a fever victim. And then scribbled notes in neutral tones about mortar fire, flak jackets,
the strap on the helmet that's always too loose or too tight,
5
All around me the sound of men sleeping,
And then I was climbing out of my blankets to slip under the tent's canopy, stumbling away from mumbling and snores,
to take a piss: and at the edge of the camp, near the chickens in their coop, heads tucked under wings,
that in the morning would obliterate its precise, four-clawed tracks that the next night and the next would keep on coming back, until the chickens got eaten, or the fox was killed. Then pattering of my own piss brought
me back into the cold, the sky overhead dark and bright,
the only heimat, homeland, patrie? Who strips us of our shadows so that our histories turn to glass?
List
Gunfire night and day in the old city won't let up as the aura of exhaustion floats me beyond sleep
and the planet on its axis tilts back a degree until the world, off-kilter, spins loose from gravity.
I'm back crossing desert hard pan, the militia commander napping in the front seat, the sun hazed out so you can't tell sky
from pebbled waste. The blasted tanks perspire in mist burning off, their turrets and barrels blistered.
Fairouz is singing about her broken heart, how her star,
In some adjutant's drawer, the Brother Leader's list of who will be terminated, imprisoned, tortured
goes on and on, name after name that ceases to exist the moment the sentence has been passed.
But Ashur, Mohammed, Ali come back to life as I scribble down their names and the wind begins to cuff
the landrover jouncing until our joints ache and the dead men staring back from between these letters,
faces lit up for a moment as they share a smoke,
as if to say, Who cares? as the landrover, shifting gears,
Dream
Scrounging, hammering scrap into pots and pans,
Litany
It isn't camels and sheep and an underground house or an abandoned oasis, the shaded grass littered with fallen dates.
It isn't tankers lined up on the horizon,
It isn't the sculpture of a golden fist crushing a fighter jet,
It's the way vodka in the house of the imam can be hidden in a plastic water bottle.
It's Ashur's unpublished papers on prostrate cancer,
for just one night who goes home to his wife and they figure out a way to make love.
It's what the German doctor whose name means "joy"
It's the joke about bullets being fired off into the air because the air makes such a good target not even a blind man
It's not the houses burned, the young men shot or kidnapped,
It's what no one will say about what no one else will say.
It's what the Revolution whispers about one war everywhere in the ear of a drone watching a camel
rippling through heatwaves on a screen.
A Drone in the Promised Land
I was streaming my way through things, a signal registering clouds of noise, when I lost myself, a drone gone out of range, and fell into this second life where what is past keeps on reoccurring: so in that ruin of a church where propaganda said Jesus preached here on his way to his crucifixion and where graffiti in fading spray paint shouts to the abandoned town, May fever make our enemies sweat, sharing the doubts of Thomas I felt the wall's powdery shell holes as if I too were fingering Christ's wounds—thumb-sized for AK,
David and Goliath. My opposites and twins. David whirls his slingstone, Goliath sways top-heavy in his armor. The diplomats in secret talks shuttle back and forth,
All standing-off ended when the stone opened its viral, spreading gash of a mind-wound:
On the fuselage, is the painted-on muzzle of a wolf meant to give its shadow, streaking across the villages, what the old man whose house was blown up, told me? "A way to make us feel the blow ... Is it meant to conjure up a being from the ash-pit of Jehoshaphat,
My circuitry most fallible when I feel the Power leading me to Canaan, my night vision lashless, unblinking as a Sphinx or squirrel,
My dream's wolfishness had gone undercover,
Propaganda
Her tolerant smile says back to my smile, Of course I'm used to
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "House of Fact, House of Ruin"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Tom Sleigh.
Excerpted by permission of GRAYWOLF PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Part 1 Three Wishes 5
Lizards 9
For a Libyan Militia Member 11
List 16
Dream 17
Litany 18
A Drone in the Promised Land 19
Propaganda 25
The Advance 27
Lady Justice 33
Enhaned Interrogation Techniques 34
Where the Magic Ends 42
My Tiger 44
Kibera 47
What Is 51
Negatives 53
The Drowned and the Saved 57
Down from the Mount 60
All the Ways Dust Tastes 65
Before Rain 68
Part 2 Genie 71
Autobiography 75
The Fox 77
Playbook 78
Net 80
The Word 82
What the Dog Really Says 84
Face 86
Dragon 87
For Brigit Kelly 88
House of Fact, House, of Ruin
1 Homilies from Home 91
2 Rest 92
3 Spider 93
4 If the Sun Should Blacken to an Asterisk 94
5 The Last to Be Excused 95
6 The Eternal Dice 97
7 The Other Garden 98
8 What Hasn't Yet Come Is Already Over 99
At the Harbor Lounge 103
Adventure 104
Dead Gull 105
Kangaroo 106
Little Myth 107
Party 108
Prayer 109
Funeral Oration 110
Long Distance 111
Hannah Reading Hemingway 112
Island 113
Notes 115