Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

TERESE SVOBODA
At the Castle
To say one thing when your song
means another.
-Ezra Pound, "Near Perigord"
I phone Geneva, thinking Africa,
looking out the window at Italy.
The man who answers says they'll kill
each other, no one can stop them,
the UN demurs. Wine, that dark blood,
stings my nose. I take the phone
to the cliff where Pound said
nothing for ten years. You can't even
call the Sudanese, they can't agree
on a code. I say they're not starving,
the ones who are killing. You have to be
strong to rape and burn boys, the ones
who sing in the dark all night,
troubadours wandering the savannah.
The wind arcs around the keep
and we both hear it. I hold
the receiver out over the battlements
and maybe the sound is someone
dying a European death,
German,Visigoth, Roman, Ice Man,
each stumbling over the bones
of the last, bones with meat
on them, bones Pound's great
grandson's dog fights for,
cur that he is. A paraglider hisses
over the pears, apples, grapes
cantilevering the slopes, taking
an exhausted loop over the spires.
Did you ever notice, I say,
how a city's most crowded cafes
offer cuisines from where the food's
most scarce? All the children under five
have starved in the province England's
size. Well, he says, the big boys
who are left, what they want is guns.
The wind falls in my silence.