What is Wanted Little news could be added except to note that the steady decline had accelerated, discussions were failing: driving from one section of the city to another where the bombing had intensified, but re-routed at the last moment, the areas of greatest damage went unseen, though stories always filter back alongside the news reports that seldom mention casualties, nor the instructions the army carries out in the territories where special permits are required prior to any movement if you are not a citizen, or if you are a resident but not a citizen, or if you are a citizen but not an enfranchised citizen, and even then it is difficult and explanations are closely attended to so as to receive what is wanted, a clean slate or good review, a report that suggests everything remains under control, and such incidents are unremarkable. It is like driving to the city's center we know has suffered, but turned away, and like water seeping through a roof, driven by gravity, searches for the path of least resistance along the rafters and joists, through the plaster, finally weeping through, seen at last along a crooked seam or crack, flaring out, feathering concertina wire, that turns us back, to count our own extremities while looking out over a field, the grasses whipped gold by the sun. * * * Our own bodies map out the world that we made for ourselves. Cratered, the city is my own heart and I am the gun unloosed. I am the city of Cain where Abel was driven from, and into my heart: harboring Abel, I search him out with the eyes of Cain. The fields are laced and wired. Birds rise up from them, then surge down like combers, settling into the thick grass, only what is lightest can trespass. What is wanted is innocence or what remains of it, buried in scar tissue so thick it begins to choke arteries and the air seems thinner, so thin our breath is pulled from us before we can swallow. The city glints in the steep sun, turning a corner, there are no buildings only their ruins, and farther, along the hillside, the corps is bulldozing a fruit grove, a house in flames. All night I will roll in my sleep shouting for Abel. * * * And if he should come, when the day's heat pressures the city, flattening the fields and hillside ruins, we know what we would do this time, we would not think this time will be different, we will not pause longer and ask if he is weary from his travels, we will not forget our jealousy, we will not forget our desires. And if he should come, we know where he has kept his knives, the whetstone, and block. We remember how he hoisted the lamb and drew the blood into vessels, how he grabbed the young goat by its first horns with his grass-stained hand and sheared the skin off deaf to its cries and the terror of the other animals, while our grain was scattered and the fruit trees sagged, ripe fruit unwanted, and if he should come, would he come this time for our children, to hoist them above his block. We were not chosen, except to be his scapegoat, except to be the prey of our own rage, even as our fruit turned gold with the orbits of bees and the welling up of nectar. The Language Exchange The Campbell Corner Home Page