A permanent echo

In Look, Solmaz Sharif builds poems out of words and phrases from the United States Department of Defense’s Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms. The terms appear in small caps, which I’m reproducing here as regular capitals.

Daily I sit
with the language
they’ve made

of our language

to NEUTRALIZE
the CAPABILITY of LOW DOLLAR VALUE ITEMS
like you.

You are what is referred to as
a “CASUALTY.” Unclear whether
from a CATALYTIC or FRONTAL ATTACK, unclear

the final time you were addressed

thou, beloved. It was for us a
CATASTROPHIC EVENT.

—From “PERSONAL EFFECTS”

Military jargon pervades the work. The jargon is by turns macho, bureaucratic, euphemistic, poetic, and inconspicuous. At times, the voices in the poems co-opt this language, but they also live and speak from inside it. It is heart-wrenching to hear them struggle against the logic and illogic of the language’s violence as it echoes through their stanzas.

BREAK-UP

1. In detection by radar, the separation of one solid return into a number of individual returns which correspond to the various objects or structure groupings.

. . .

[before the moment I first saw you,
a scaffolding a city walks beneath,
I like to think
we walked into Masjid-e Imam
and sent our voices up into its mosaic domes
and heard them clap back to us in seven
divine echoes, that our voices became
a PERMANENT ECHO, that we called
our names up into a dome to hear]

the separation of one solid return

[as our names returned, names
not even a blip on their]

radar

[names]

which correspond

[to our obsessions, mine
which means flower that never dies
and yours for an archer
who launched his arrow
and its impossible]

range

[which mapped the ends of the Persian Empire]

Photo: Interior view of a dome in the Masjid-e Imam mosque, CC BY-SA 3.0