If the Moon Kept Goats: The Veteran’s Tale, and: The Moment before a Change

Abstract

If the Moon Kept Goats: The Veteran’s Tale, and: The Moment before a Change Christopher Howell (bio) If the Moon Kept Goats: The Veteran’s Tale I can’t believe I’m saying this again after so many years, but those things that keep coming back name us and we have to let them in. There was a war. Unquenchable roaring bells surrounded it like a woman on fire inside a dress. Some of us were taken away on ships to be part of this and came back full of broken furniture, our faces [End Page 135] black kites over fields of ice. We had walked in harness so wrong and deep, not even the sand man would let us sleep. And me? I was a case. I left everything lie like dead thieves in a bank, and, beyond loyalty and war, set my desperate bones to hold a woman who could barely hold herself inside the world become a world I didn’t know. And what if she had left her husband then and the light by which we thought we knew ourselves had not failed, as it does, when we needed it exactly? What if the moon kept goats? As I touched her to lure happiness out of its tormented cage, I thought of my father’s faithfulness and wondered how it was, and by what right, he had returned from his war and fashioned from the remnants a whole life. I thought of the southern cross and the enemy—then now and always—looking up, as we had, but breathing easy, minds luffing a bit, buoyed out by the wonder of clarified commitment and it occurred to me that from a certain point of view there was no hope at all. [End Page 136] I saw things in the trees. I stopped eating salt and grew a red shadow that drifts with me still under the April wood, circling a candle of dead confusion, unable to blow it out. Think of that. Think of a whole generation of us, hands in our fathers’ hands and the sun seething with impossible conjunctions, war on both sides of us and love in between. The Moment before a Change In shallows, among reeds and whispers of the troubled lilies, I am uneasy. The yellow mouth of the moon is shut. A grey glow comes upon the world again and again it is Mercer Lake in 1955 when I crept out of the rented cabin and saw the huge black angel bathing, hard pewter-colored pieces of lake falling from his wings. I gave some of my eyesight and most of what I had been hoping for as a bribe that he might bless me [End Page 137] and he gave me an onyx lens to hold against the change of light and its bread bumping darkly under layers of mist. All common prayer is uselessness when memory dresses and descends into you, leaving doors ajar and immense fir trees and mirrored alleyways of fallen shelves everywhere you step. I know you, it says, you’re the one who stands reed still under new stars and the old ones with their faces turned away, the one who’s uneasy, who remembers and hasn’t quite paid. Christopher Howell Christopher Howell’s ninth collection of poems, Dreamless and Possible: New & Selected, will be published by the University of Washington Press next year. Other work may be seen in current issues of FIELD, the Journal, Crazyhorse, and Gettysburg Review. “I was born right at the end of the war and have gone through my whole life with this huge knot of people, like a snake swallowing an orange, as they say. In some ways it has been good, since it provided us all with many compatriots whose general understandings about life had similar bases. But that large population group also created unprecedented competition for jobs, housing, notoriety, perhaps even for spouses: by external measure, the very terms of satisfaction. I think the interplay between the collegiality and the competition has driven many of us inward, away from material standards, which is, of course, a good thing. So it’s been an interesting...