Benjamin Busch
Aegri Somnia
The sailor gives us directions in longitude
and latitude because of the flood,
doesn’t use roads,
carries bolt cutters for fences,
round stones for dogs.
He can’t find the people he knew before the war
and someone built houses on their hard clay fields.
Tells us he put silver dollars in Mason jars,
submerged his money long ago,
measured the location in footsteps
from a tree
in his sleep.
We can only guess how long he’s been aweigh,
nothing left but a suitcase of sand,
going by nicknames he’s given himself,
but everyone knows it’s him,
confused by past tense in conversations.
“She was a sweet girl,” he says,
the tablecloth stretched, too frail to be a sail,
the space misshapen,
elders pulling the creases flat,
clenching their stories.
No one has watered the plants in the window,
left dry, they sacrifice leaves one by one,
and the man eyes us all without forgiveness,
deciding we chose to beg indoors away from the rain.
Candles are lit, campaign medals worn down to coins,
wallpaper smelling of cigarettes,
and he’s counting with his feet from a stump,
making the sound of wind as he breathes.
He can’t find on land
what he buried at sea.
Mow
Mowing the lawn sends a violent message,
all mundane, imperial, and cruel, slashing everything level,
sparing only the lilies and the stones.
I was trained to be territorial.
No one can hear me apologize
while pushing that damn machine,
bent to it, the low handle bar trembling,
both of us engines, obsessed, furious,
grass and steel called blades,
the coughing so loud I can’t hear the world gasp anymore.
But know this: From the sidewalk to my house is mine.
Within this atomic measurement of universe, I’ll cut you down.
Sound
There’s a sound in my mind.
It’s not real.
My ears imagine it,
and I can’t convince them
it’s in their head.
They’re supposed to convert waves into voice,
drums, and birdsong.
But this is endless,
louder when it’s quiet.
Tinnitus. Tintinnabulation.
It can just happen, no fault of your own.
Mine began by explosion, the air clapped flat,
so loud I was lifted by sound.
The doctor says it’s a sign of my age.
I don’t tell him about the bombs.
The only treatment is to create more roar,
waterfall, radio, white noise,
or war.
Maybe it’s a gift, a sense reset to receive
spectral frequencies, narrowband transmissions,
pulsars, whales, the core of the earth.
I can hear it all,
now that I can’t listen for silence.
“My work often begins from some immediate experience and then I track it into the wilderness. I tend to expand a moment into an immensity of one kind or another. Many of my poems can be read as simple notes on the surface, single observations of domestic or community occurrences. I’m paying attention to trash by the road, billboards, waiting rooms, and people walking alone. Some lines have followed me home from war. I’m collecting habits, chores, and errands that don’t seem worthy of scrutiny or celebration. Where do our labors lead us? What part of us lives in exile? What happens next? If I write about getting a wound, I’m thinking of its scar. If I write about a garage sale, I’m thinking of our artifacts. And if I write about cutting the lawn, well, I’m connecting it to acts of nation and empire. That’s ‘Mow.’ How small events endure in us fascinates me. That’s “Sound.” How we eventually vanish in our journey and won’t know we’re gone. That’s “Aegri Somnia.” I thank you all for spending some time looking around with me.” —Benjamin Busch
Benjamin Busch is a writer, farmer, filmmaker, and illustrator. Following a studio art degree from Vassar College, he served as a Marine Corps infantry and light armored reconnaissance officer, deploying twice to Iraq. He’s the writer/director of the films BRIGHT and Sympathetic Details, and appeared on HBO’s The Wire and Generation Kill. He’s the author of the memoir Dust to Dust (Ecco), and his essays have arrived in Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Guernica, NPR, and Best American Travel Writing. His poetry has appeared in North American Review, Prairie Schooner, Five Points, Epiphany, and Nimrod, among others.