Boy Soldier, and: King Swat

Abstract

Boy Soldier, and: King Swat Harriet Levin (bio) Boy Soldier So hard to balance the picture in this morning’s paper of a Congolese soldier—age twelve—balancing a rifle across his chest, his innocence in camouflage, his eyes so bloodshot they portend rivers risen high above their rims. Ignominious rains languor and overlap. The rains take lilies in their clutch. They take the innate, negligible blossoms. The photo borders the box where the day’s winning lottery tickets are posted. The glamour of the winner drives the spinner. There’s no time to consider the dreary font of a dredge, and I’m unbalanced, grainy, paying in splits, flicking ashes, and everything else I look at this sun-soaked, withering October day so set on edge, so ready to tip. The photographer balances the legs of his tripod over a rut in the road, the whorls on my fingertips as black as when the psychic held my hand and read the break in the line, while the next girl dipped her finger in lip gloss. I’d like to spread her shine, dab it on in loads looking for a way to make amends with others and with myself. A dusky grouse. A turkey vulture. Even these [End Page 162] lift up. They fly slantwise. They find a vein to convey them southerly and go forth astride this tilted earth. King Swat You’ll find him in his father’s hardware store, dusty with sun motes, squatting on the warped, creaking floor. Elvis’s plastic bust bemusedly crowds the entry and radium dials charge the air, infiltrating blood, upstream and downstream, to partake of more. Mostly he traps flies under pistachio shells, convincing customers to bet on the one that can race the fastest. Transparent angel’s wings burnishing their arcs onto the half shells, like words etched onto stone tablets, words of the soul spoken to no one. He thinks he can save the world, ex nihilo and the eradication of lawns flanked with lantern bearers painted in blackface. Illusions of ticker-tape parades, medals festooning his neck, blown kisses and floating petals. He’s King Swat, king of halcyon corners, king of the buzzless air. Perhaps he can squash the sorrow that encircles you, the sorrow that lands on your skin. Sometimes a boy’s boastful hand bestows vision, ever a flick, fine-tuned to the phantasmagoric. [End Page 163] Harriet Levin Harriet Levin’s first book of poems, The Christmas Snow (Beacon P) was chosen by Eavan Boland for a Barnard New Women Poet’s Prize and was a winner of an Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America. A forthcoming book, “Girl in Cap and Gown,” will appear this fall. Recent or forthcoming work appears in Kenyon Review, Cimarron Review, Many Mountains Moving, and Harvard Review. She is director of the Drexel University Writing Program and The Reunion Project, a celebration of literacy and perseverance that works to reunite Lost Girls and Boys of Sudan with their families. Copyright © 2009 University of Nebraska Press