A wasp had built a nest outside the backdoor.
Every time I went to knock it down, the wasp
was working the chambers. I waited two days,
finally turned off the water
while doing dishes, picked up a knife,
went out and cut the nest free
of the doorframe, where it hung by little more
than a thread of wood the wasp had chewed
to pulp. The wasp was there, flew off,
and was back, on the fallen nest, just now,
when I checked after typing "working the chambers."
It started to walk away, the morning
too cold for flight, when I knelt
to pick up the nest. In each of the open chambers,
a grayish dot that will become a larva,
then a pupa, then a wasp who builds nests
for grayish dots. Two of the chambers were sealed.
I moved the nest to the top of a plastic box
enclosing telephone wires on the side of the house—
brightly colored wires with white stripes
running their length, wires of the human voice—
scooped the wasp onto a long, rusted hinge
that has sat for months on the porch railing,
placed the wasp on the nest, and came back to tell you
this is the poem I've been trying to write
about the man I stood beside during the national anthem
at a ballgame, who placed his prosthetic hand
over his heart, looking more like a boy from the outside,
where I was, and sang, in his uniform, harder
than I ever have, without a sense
of irony. Though how he would do that,
or what the inflections of irony are, I don't know,
or if it was two hands—a prosthetic, a phantom,
a grip, a ghost—over his heart, a memory
of his hand, his life, our country
as it was, whole, possible. I've wondered
every day since, like when the wasp was there, just now,
as if nothing had changed, when everything had changed.

Thinking of his hand as a phantom, just as the reasons
for the war in Iraq are phantoms. His hand a flame
as the burning of a Humvee is a torch. The sense
that we should not, who haven't been there, speak of nails,
bullets flying. Of war itself, this severing
itself. A piece of shop window, even a rib
blown free, ripping through the séance of his flesh,
the mood of his flesh to know and to hold. That
I should not, who has not been there, speak of this. But you see
how I start to. That a space is opened by his hand, absence
creating absence, and I have to fill it, it's what I do—
this isn't an ars poetica—it's what we do,
all we do, essentially, that dogs do not,
butterflies do not: see a thing and draw it
to another thing, make them clash and kiss, knit, gather.
His brain too is doing this. Fusing. Making
a kind of metaphor of sensation. His face, when he smiles,
when a breeze strokes, triggers the life of his hand,
for these encodings dwell beside each other in the cortex—
what the hand feels, what the face feels. And since his hand
is gone, and no sensations arrive to this region,
to this love, his face is taking it over, telling his mind,
This equals this.

Probably. Truth is I don't know. We didn't speak,
the man and I, of the ballgame, the weather, his hand.
Crack of the bat, blue sky, hotdogs
that smell at the ballpark like they smell
nowhere else. Perhaps he feels no haunting,
no ghost reaching for the butter knife, no itch
that isn't there being there, persistent as air.
Perhaps he would be Shiva for this war, acquire
more limbs to "lose" or "give," horrible words
that suggest misplaced keys or wrapped boxes
under tinseled trees. In an earlier version of this poem,
I used his hand as an excuse to write

               This equals this: I'm a phantom of the body politic
if I don't speak, I'm required to, freedom's
a tended dream, a public mapping of belief.
When we're silent, government flows into the spaces
we leave open, and remaps, acquires for itself
the severed faculties of democracy.

An excuse, a catalyst, an image to carry these ideas.
But I kept coming back to what I didn't know, what
I couldn't say, honestly, unless I made a character
of the man, and today, finally, on the ninth attempt,
it occurred to me that the absence of his hand
speaks of his absence from my life and my absence
from his. I know no soldiers. I know no one who knows
a soldier. So this is a war on tv, a program, a dream,
The Odyssey, The Green Berets, Platoon. Proximity is required
to feel, understand. I know the wasp, have looked into ...
its face? its life? ... have entered some moment with it—
crack of the bat, blue sky—existed with it in time, as time,
as do beings who act in sight of each other, giving life
the motion by which it exists, as trees are required
for a copse, an edge for deer to cross between the field
and safety.
                        His hand, possible ghost reaching
for his wife's breast, for the cloth to draw
across his son's back in the tub, under which
his lungs rise and fall, rose and fell, with which he felt, feels,
his son's lungs, now, with his other hand. A severing
by class? Mostly. By money? Mostly. I know no soldiers,
I write poems, we are phantoms to each other,
such that saying no to war is not real, saying yes to war
is not real. Saying—speech, the rivering of sound
to reach, enter, join, touch—is not real.
And with that loss we disappear, who are only speech,
as a cheetah is only speed, as the sun is only a burning
that does not singe the sky.