NPM 9/30: Guard Duty
Guard Duty
The metropolis of Tel Aviv is like a landed fish.
Shoreside, thrashing and scaled with glass,
survives on hiccups, on the sheer will
to keep wet & pump gargling money past her gills.
In the heart of Tel Aviv there is a military base:
a plot of stucco, monstrous antennae, and olive drab.
It’s pocked with Cyprus, Eucalyptus, and spun round
with 5 lane streets, malls, high-rise firms, quietless
onramps, rail lines and a four foot electronic fence
strung up on six foot masonry. On top of that
there are barbed hooks of wire like some tackle
that the city swallowed and survived.
The fortress sports fourfold main gates, and these
pump servicemen and women in cardiac streams.
The gate where I stand fidgeting is chained up solid
for the night, its precise automated bars set even
as a jouster’s mask. I’m armed and bored and everyone
walks by, even past midnight: overtimers in thin suits,
students with backpacks big as wounded men,
paperboys hauling bales of news, and polite drunks,
clubbers and sleepless widows, never looking for me
standing watch behind the bars, booted and combat-ready,
bullet riddled. I yawn like a pelican.
The volume on the CB radio is busted,
so the on-the-hour checks roar in, dividing
all creation ‘tween inanimate or startled. The spot
is crawling with imprudent rats, wiry cats,
the patient glow of floodlights like the bioluminescent
lures of the deepest sea. From somewhere out among
the ministries and foreign banks, a lost sea breeze
wanders down, sending me back to the helm
of a sail ship at night, where I stood watch a couple
years before, the gun oil on my fingers turning quick
to winch grease. There were stars there, not these
sore red blinks that warn the planes to stay away.
Below us, they say, beeps the fish’s brain, in a bunker
dug down tens of tens of feet below the waves.
In the flared chest of Israel there’s a fish
called Tel Aviv, and in the barbed heart of that fish
there is a military base where I stand guard
over a hole, a gate, a ship, a state and a stray cat
that just began to toy and tear its prey to bits.
