Haditha

HADITHA

City of ancient
waterwheels, each wheel
scooping Euphrates
to aqueducts
long since usurped
by an upriver dam.

City of folksong,
city of music.
Voice cast over each
small but intentional
plash from dipper
to dipper, to trough
and runnel and fall,
Sadi al Hadithi
hurls nomad throatsongs,
over the tape player,
over the airwaves.
His voice—stretching,
then breaking
the bias of banged-up,
grimy cassettes,
crackling frequencies—
wrenches its way, cascades
down the passionate
semitones, notes now
water, now stones,
notes that curl,
inflect bed and sun,
voice threading in
and out of each note
until, abruptly, it’s not
like water but just jeep’s
lurch, careening off road,
gullet to gully,
down desert ravine.

Folklore city, holiday city,
now city of last resort.

The place is a haven, the place is a rat hole.
The Sunnis, the bastards, the Mujahideen
left other bad places—Fallujah, Ramadi—
to hole up here. Now they’re killing
each other. They propped up the head
of one guy they cut down on top of his back,
up there on that bridge. You see how it’s painted
with red: that’s blood. No more singing
for him. The fuckers, they’re everywhere:
they blew up my buddy, there, right next to me.
Pop! He was gone. . . . You go into a house,
you stick the weapon around and you spray:
it’s called prepping the room. It’s harder
and harder to make out the bad guys.
Shit: even the kids are counting patrols.
So you grab them, throw them back
in their houses: all you can do.
Whatever it takes to get home.

That was November and now it’s June.
The first report said five men burst from a taxi and ran,
that an I.E.D. killed fifteen. But now bullet holes
are appearing in foreheads, in temples, in hands,
in throats, in chests, in women, in children,
in men it seems they didn’t take time to yank
from the taxi (see how the blood pooled),
in empty houses, in houses at hand,
in groups someone gathered,
someone who took time—
three hours, five—
someone who held them,
steadied each shot.

Sooner or later,
we’ll have all the details.
The clouds will diffuse,
the parts will congeal.
“We’ll have a picture,”
the White House spokesperson says.

But already there aren’t just fifteen
but twenty-four, one for each
well-tempered note of our scale,
each corpse a prelude,
each skull a fugue,
one for each major key,
one for each minor,
running the gamut,
full diatonic.

by William Kumbier