Free Station Zed by Tom Sleigh Page A

…”
    Which because it was how he felt
    it’s what he wrote.
    But now there’s no tomorrow,
    only languor and despondency.
    And under that shelter in the storm, among rocks
    falling, he finally felt free
    to say what his Daemon made him say, and looked up into the rain
    and was for that instant washed clean.
9
    English letters are Greek ones dried up.
    The aurora on the screen
    pulses more real than real.
    The post-nuclear, post-holocaust rain he tried to understand
    is only another afternoon when the world ends.
    And now what passes through him
    is a windchime ringing, casting parabolic shadows on the ground
    as he hunches at work in his little cubicle,
    a cell 8 × 10
    which is just another world coming to an end
    when twenty years on since the chiming ceased,
    I try again to understand the points he plots
    where thrust equals gravity and drag
    so the rocket can keep soaring on forever.
10
    Glowing on the screen, the initial
    capital in the shape of Omega holds inside its void
    two flying dragons biting their own tails.
    And on another page
    Alpha traces out the lines
    of the Tower of Babel collapsing.
    And just beneath that, a king lies dreaming of a golden statue
    crushed by a stone that becomes a great mountain
    so that the four kingdoms, gold, silver, brass, iron,
    shine in gilt from the vellum—
    and across Daniel’s face the shadow of a wing
    which is the Lord’s wing whispering to Daniel the dream of the king
    turns black as the screen when the screen goes to sleep
    and a hand writes an unknown equation across the dark.

Valediction
    The backyard lives of cat and bird
    and the way leaves give themselves
    away this instant to the all-but-no breeze
    creeping across the silver-painted roof where clouds,
    reflected, pass dark, then bright
    above a book left out by the vacant deck chair
    fluttering its pages, signaling to the reader somewhere out of sight
    to come back, come back and start the book over,
    this all arrives without a valediction forbidding anything,
    just the sense of seeing something
    or someone for the last time: the poet’s faded fedora
    in a tea-store window haunting this October’s primary
    blues bringing back mid-May and the missing mate
    of the nightingale singing “day long and night late.”
    i.m. Seamus Heaney

NOTES
    “The Craze”
    Demmies is short for “demolition experts.”
    “Hunger”
    Ba, Akh , and Duat are terms used in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. Ba is a spiritual entity, often depicted as a human-headed bird hovering over the deceased’s body, or exiting the tomb. It’s the part of the soul that can travel between the worlds of the living and the dead. Akh is the “blessed or ‘transfigured’ soul” of a dead person whose soul has been judged to be just by Osiris and so is allowed to enter the Afterlife. Duat is the dangerous landscape of the underworld, complete with demons and monsters who guard the gates that the Ba has to pass through in becoming an Akh .
    “Eclipse”
    A panga is a bush knife shaped much like a machete.
    A matatu is a minibus used as an inexpensive, shared taxi by most ordinary people in Nairobi. They are often decorated with pictures of movie stars, musicians, politicians, and other famous people, as well as religious leaders. They are often equipped with sound systems that blare Motown, R & B, and Afro-Pop.
    “KM4”
    KM4 refers to a central roundabout in Mogadishu, Somalia, near the Ministry of Education building where a suicide bomber, on October 4, 2011, killed 100 people and injured more than 110 others.
    A macawis is a sarong-like garment worn by men.
    A chador is a long robe worn by Muslim women.
    UNHCR stands for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
    “Proof of Poetry”
    The poem is indebted to a passage from Aleksander Wat’s My Century .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Agni: “Party at Marquis de Sade’s Place”
    The American Poetry Review: “The Negative”
    Blackbird: “KM4”
    The Commons: “The Eclipse”
    The Cortland