Bamiyan Buddha (2002)

1. The progress of sculpture

Unarticulated segments of a tale
sprawl upon a shop floor, like the litter
of body parts in Rodin’s studio, his desks
crammed with fingers. Whole wrists
cluttered the work-bench, connected
to forearms, sometimes not so connected.
An injection mold was a handy device.
You could trap the shape of an object
and watch its essence burn away.
And as it burned you seized its shape,
the plaster casting crumbled off,
life replaced with a bronze exterior.

But what about carving the god in a cliff?
How do you write Sanskrit in sandstone
as if within the word were inherent already
and you traced it in eroding, porous rock.

Watchmaker, deity--whatever-- how much
have I admired how you end things, the parting
of your plaster halves. And which is thesis
and which antithesis and what is synthesis

when you carve the sandstone from a wall
and leave the god, not bare, but barely solid,
his cold eye overscanning villages,
the bray of pack animals, the muezzin’s call,
the rifle’s whip-crack: so far all is scenery.


2.

And the sentry stys amazed
with bits of finger-tip or eye-lid
as he overturns them with his rifle-barrel.
And the infidel from which they came
towers overhead still, albeit imperfectly,
his sensors broken off from cannon-practice.

That many guns have been molded from an idea
he can figure. Nomadic, he leaves details to others.
But who wrought this? feminine, apercanthine folds

a turbulence he can’t smooth out
in a spot called his heart? This detail was meant
to be a quiet space between two costly campaigns.
The sooner they do the statues in, the better.

3.

I’m tired of meals and prayers,
of scooping rice with stones from shell-heads,
equipment rusting before it’s touched
and the halter straps that chafe my back,
and the bandolier lashing it,
of huddling in ditches or drinking cloudy water.
I’m twenty-six, and never been kissed,
feel forty-five, the age my father made.
He’s the one who told me God
refuses to measure life in hour-glasses.
I raise a standard among the sand-mounds.
I split a landmine like an interred skull,
march miles a day, live on chaff, not wheat.


3. Crossroads

Najibullah, the last secular leader,
dangles, an effigy under a traffic box.
Yellow melts upon his puncture wounds
while his circuitry is snapped by girth.
(Liberators dragged the corpse for hours.)

He’s the medium for the message:
beware. But yellow lights
on four sides flash, for departures
and arrivals. Gautauma Buddha
gets a headache from this flashing.

How disengage yourself from caution,
from all corners? How declutch?
What if the corners are the elements?
A space between the red and green
was outside time and matter. This is new.

4.

Buddha's stone detachment cannot pity
wounds and desecrations, hideous as Christ.
Only the bodily envelope perishes.

Isolated as a subject for study, blood is mystery–
besides, who doesn’t have a common parent?
their daily sign the weather slapping his cheek...

So how can those with gut-shots utter
for their last word, mama, crawling, anyway?

5.

At the zoo, captive birds escape
through rusty holes in the aviary’s steel mesh.

6.

False paradise he doesn’t bother to contemplate,
pain a kind of speculation he expects to overcome,
a shroud of fire he can peel from sandstone guts
that shouldn’t change: wasn’t he hollowed into being
by an incessant chipping off of the formless
until in deep relief he jutted from this keyhole,
another pharaoh, stiffly brushed by wind-storms?

7.

What sorcerer or scientist could augur
the many ways his shot-off extremities
connect to landscape once they’re fractured--
small parts usurped by wind for rain to melt
or ice to rub: more careless than unkind, karma
lets everyone eventually through the door...

but overturns first, overturns and overturns ...

8.

...that is, if he can think upon that salient, far
from caravanserai, rescue. Getting over it,
perhaps he muses that in their truthful moments,
lounging on his toe, the guards talk of love,
disinclined to notice striations and water-cuts
from ricochets and rare torrential rains,

8.

or thanks whatever cosmic dispensation
forged him from prima materia so porous, compliant
with weather, that when it comes, it’s with the shudder
of a patient under gas. Of all models to imagine,
he settles on pregnancy. Why not rocks from boulders,
chips from old blocks? What goes around, after all, comes.

To think he started as a mound of shells,
a chalk through which the ocean percolated.