Waiting for a Number

Peter Balakian - 1951-

words appeared as the soft purring of a cat, crow screeching,
end of a hymn, cicadas in trees—spilling in the white
noise of my head—Da Nang Mekong Saigon Nam.

I walked suburban streets to school, hi-fi blasting Somebody To Love,
coach meting out orders, my playbook of fakes and jives,
my head swelling in the helmet. Over sweet cocktails with my beloved

under the yellowing gingkoes of 64th off Lex, for a moment I felt
grown up and then the air in my head was orange chemical Dow
and DuPont, the juke box blasting Light My Fire—and where were we?

staring at the image: pistol to the head, a boy I once knew
on the white-lined field was bagged
and flown back in the dioxin haze of morning.

In the mangrove of my head chopping sounds
under the covers, rice patties—floating mirrors with unidentified
objects. There were Catholics in Saigon and Catholics on my street,

what about Laos? what about Cambodia?
American questions spilling in sunlight on white
shutters, and I’m home on plush carpet waiting for a number.

It’s not the wind I hear driving south through the Catskills—it’s just bad news from the radio and then a hailstorm morphs into sunlight —look up and there’s— an archipelago of starlings trailing some clouds— But how does the wind come through you primordial hollow—unflattened double reed— so even now when bad news comes with the evening report— I can press a button on the dashboard and hear your breath implode the way wind blows through the slit windows of a church in Dilijan, then a space in my head fills with a sound that rises from red clay dust roads and slides through your raspy apricot wood— Hiss of tires, wet tarmac, stray white lines night coming like wet dissolve to pixilation— Praise to the glottal stop of every hoarse whisper, every sodden tree which speaks through your hollow carved wood— so we can hear the air flow over starlings rising and dipping as the mountains glaze the sun— so we can hear the bad news kiss the wind through your whetted reed—

For most in the United States the word brings a phase when mortars in Vietnam still whistled around them and the scandal of Nixon and his Machiavellian buds poured from the news into their subconscious—I see that Watergate too: the televised hearings, and in particular one session—Sam Ervin had just asked Ehrlichman or Dean or Haldeman, a long-winded, periphrastic, left-branching question—it must have lasted forty seconds and seemed three days before he paused for effect, and Ehrlichman or Dean or Haldeman answered: “Senator, could you please repeat the question?” And he did, verbatim! And that is one Watergate. But I think also of the morning my father sent me to the creek that ran through our pasture to remove a dead calf a flood had floated north to lodge against our water gate— a little Guernsey heifer—I had petted her often— Now flies buzzed around her, bloated and entangled in the mesh—and I remember her eyes were open, so she seemed to watch as I pulled first one leg then another from the vines and wire that trapped her, and pulled her to the bank through the shallow water. Because the second water gate, which features the tender relationship between a dead calf and a little boy, happened twenty years before the first, in which men break into an office complex in a hotel, I prefer its posts and hog wire that kept cows from a neighbor’s field to the gray rows of filing cabinets that brought down a presidency. The water pours out of the mountain and runs to the sea. Sometimes I say it to myself, until the meanings leave. I say Watergate until it is water pouring through water.

Poems

Waiting for a Number

More by Peter Balakian

Ode to the Duduk

Little Richard

Related Poems

Facing It

The War in Colors

The Watergate

poets.org

academy of american poets

national poetry month

american poets

Poems

Waiting for a Number

Newsletter Sign Up

Support Us

Follow Us