Rick Mullin

Waziristan

They send their children into mountain passes,
children from emerging frontier cities
file in rite of passage to the war.
Waziristan, the northern tribal zone
resurges, reinforced with hungry children
of the dispossessed invisible.

The networks are enhanced, invisible,
uncoiling through the infinite snow passes
and electric channels through which children
shunt to detonate in modern cities
where there is no God but God: The Zone,
Waziristan, the garden of the war.

The vast magnetic sweep of modern war
erases maps, combatants fade, invisible
perversions coalesce. Across the Zone
a vulnerable thread of soldiers passes
through the stone and snow. While in the cities
of the new frontier the hungry children

lean on radios, distracted children
in the modern world tune out the war.
They’re sick of louder voices in the cities
and the lies that hype invisible
yet color-coded danger. Now, what passes
for commitment flows into a witless zone

of pallid bumper magnets. But the Zone
has opened browsers and enlisted children
from the London Underground with passes
that are honored at the gates of war.
Which could be anywhere. Invisible.
The giant holes surrounding giant cities.

Witness their arrival in the cities,
and you’ll watch them fill the holes. The zone
of death will garner wreaths. Invisible
formations in the wind will cry like children
on the anniversary. The war
arrives one day, it detonates and passes.

Winding passes of the frontier cities
know the war at heart, that hollow zone
where children radiate invisible.

Companion Piece — Drive Time

It took five years of commuting to Edison New Jersey on the Garden State Parkway to ensponge the engine of my beloved Tercel. And in that time, I watched certain other institutions and icons — not least of which America and the Pabst bottling factory beside the big graveyard in Newark — take a similar beating.

It was a time of change in my life. After twenty years of working in New York, I had taken a job in my home state. This meant that instead of walking out the door of an office building onto the streets of Manhattan at lunchtime, I would pretty much stay inside a squat, twin-tower structure across the street from the railroad tracks in a development called Metro Park. Close by Thomas Edison’s famed Menlo Park workshop, it is the only part of New Jersey that looks exactly like Houston, where the lack of zoning laws has led to patches of squat glass office parks on residential streets all over the city.

It also meant that after two decades of riding a New Jersey Transit train through the Meadowlands to the ferry terminal in Hoboken, I’d be stuck behind the wheel in New Jersey traffic. No longer able to read the New York Times on the way to work, I’d be reduced to listening to National Public Radio and reading bumper stickers.

I got used to it. In fact, I probably became better informed. NPR covers a lot of ground and can be somewhat enjoyable once you acclimate. But it’s the bumper stickers that really kept me in touch with what was going on. Nobody had a better sense than the alert Garden State Parkway driver, for example, of how perilously close New Jersey came to becoming a red state in 2004.

I wrote Waziristan driving on the Parkway, listening to NPR, and taking in the bumper stickers. I incorporated things that occurred to me on the commute — thoughts about homogenization and loss of control. Thoughts about the war. Writing it became an exercise in defining a new world that I had been assured by Thomas L. Friedman (in his interview with NPR’s Terry Gross) is flat. On its flat surface, I wanted to find the position of certain touchstones, certain... clichés — the Rite of Passage, the Modern World, the New Frontier. I went to work in the alley of bumper stickers, tuning-in to America and the world on a crummy car radio. My comprehension of the rather grave state of things went into the sestina, as did my experience working three blocks from the World Trade Center/Ground Zero between September, 2000 and September, 2002.

No, you can’t read newspapers while driving. And you can’t go to sleep, as I must admit I did more mornings than not on the tracks to Hoboken. You have to keep your eyes open and on the road. You can, however, write poetry — at least as much poetry as you can remember for an hour — when you’re driving on the Garden State Parkway.