Poppies: Three Variations

1.

I HAD AN uncle once who served in Flanders. Flanders, or was it France? I’m old enough to have had the uncle but not old enough to remember. Wherever, those fields are green again, and ploughed and harvested, though they keep throwing up rusty shells, broken skulls. The uncle wore a beret and marched in parades, though slowly. We always bought those felt poppies, which aren’t even felt any more, but plastic: small red explosions pinned to your chest, like a blow to the heart. Between the other thoughts, that one crosses my mind. And the tiny lead soldiers in the shop windows, row on row of them, not lead any more, too poisonous, but every detail perfect, and from every part of the world: India, Africa, China, America. That goes to show, about war – in retrospect it becomes glamour, or else a game we think we could have played better. From time to time the stores mark them down, you can get bargains. There are some for us, too, with our new leafy flag, not the red rusted-blood one the men fought under. That uncle had place-mats with the old flag, and cups and saucers. The planes in the sky were tiny then, almost comical, like kites with wind-up motors; I’ve seen them in movies. The uncle said he never saw the larks. Too much smoke, or fog. Too much roaring, though on some mornings it was very still. Those were the most dangerous. You hoped you would act bravely when the moment came, you kept up your courage by singing. There was a kind of fly that bred in the corpses, there were thousands of them he said; and during the bombardments you could scarce hear yourself think. Though sometimes you heard things anyway: the man beside him whispered, “Look,” and when he looked there was no more torso: just a red hole, a wet splotch in mid-air. That uncle’s gone now too, the number of vets in the parade is smaller each year, they limp more. But in the windows the soldiers multiply, so clean and colourfully painted, with their little intricate guns, their shining boots, their faces, brown or pink or yellow, neither smiling nor frowning. It’s strange to think how many soldiers like that have been owned over the years, loved over the years, lost over the years, in backyards or through gaps in porch floors. They’re lying down there, under our feet in the garden and below the floorboards, armless or legless, faces worn half away, listening to everything we say, waiting to be dug up.

2.

Cup of coffee, the usual morning drug. He’s off jogging, told her she shouldn’t be so sluggish, but she can’t get organized, it involves too many things: the right shoes, the right outfit, and then worrying about how your bum looks, wobbling along the street. She couldn’t do it alone anyway, she might get mugged. So instead she’s sitting remembering how much she can no longer remember, of who she used to be, who she thought she would turn into when she grew up. We are the dead: that’s about the only line left from In Flanders Fields, which she had to write out twenty times on the blackboard, for talking. When she was ten and thin, and now see. He says she should go vegetarian, like him, healthy as lettuce. She’d rather eat poppies, get the opiates straight from the source. Eat daffodils, the poisonous bulb like an onion. Or better, slice it into his soup. He’ll blow his nose on her once too often, and then. Between the rock and the hard cheese, that’s where she sits, inert as a prisoner, making little crosses on the wall, like knitting, counting the stitches row on row, that old trick to mark off the days. Our place, he calls this dump. He should speak for himself, she’s just the mattress around here, she’s just the cleaning lady, and when he ever lifts a finger there’ll be sweet pie in the sky. She should burn the whole thing down, just for larks; still, however bravely she may talk, to herself, where would she go after that, what would she do? She thinks of the bunch of young men they saw, downtown at night, where they’d gone to dinner, his birthday. High on something, singing out of tune, one guy’s fly half-open. Freedom. Catch a woman doing that, panty alert, she’d be jumped by every creep within a mile. Too late to make yourself scarce, once they get the skirt up. She’s heard of a case like that, in a poolhall or somewhere. That’s what keeps her in here, in this house, that’s what keeps her tethered. It’s not a mid-life crisis, which is what he says. It’s fear, pure and simple. Hard to rise above it. Rise above, like a balloon or the cream on milk, as if all it takes is hot air or fat. Or will-power. But the reason for that fear exists, it can’t be wished away. What she’d need in real life is a few guns. That and the technique, how to use them. And the guts, of course. She pours herself another cup of coffee. That’s her big fault: she might have the gun but she wouldn’t pull the trigger. She’d never be able to hit a man below the belt.

3.

In school, when I first heard the word Flanders I thought it was what nightgowns were made of. And pyjamas. But then I found it was a war, more important to us than others perhaps because our grandfathers were in it, maybe, or at least some sort of ancestor. The trenches, the fields of mud, the barbed wire, became our memories as well. But only for a time. Photographs fade, the rain eats away at statues, the neurons in our brains blink out one by one, and goodbye to vocabulary. We have other things to think about, we have lives to get on with. Today I planted five poppies in the front yard, orangey-pink, a new hybrid. They’ll go well with the marguerites. Terrorists blow up airports, lovers slide blindly in between the sheets, in the soft green drizzle my cat crosses the street; in the spring regatta the young men row on, row on, as if nothing has happened since 1913, and the crowds wave and enjoy their tall drinks with cucumber and gin. What’s wrong with that? We can scrape by, more or less, getting from year to year with hardly a mark on us, as long as we know our place, don’t mouth off too much or cause uproars. A little sex, a little gardening, flush toilets and similar discreet pleasures; and in the sky the satellites go over, keeping a bright eye on us. The ospreys, the horned larks, the shrikes and the woodland warblers are having a thinner time of it, though still bravely trying to nest in the lacunae left by pesticides, the sharp blades of the reapers. If it’s singing you want, there’s lots of that, you can tune in any time; coming out of your airplane seat-mate’s earphones it sounds like a fly buzzing, it can drive you crazy. So can the news. Disaster sells beer, and this month hurricanes are the fashion, and famines: scarce this, scarce that, too little water, too much sun. With every meal you take huge bites of guilt. The excitement in the disembodied voices says: you heard it here first. Such a commotion in the mid-brain! Try meditation instead, be thankful for the annuals, for the smaller mercies. You listen, you listen to the moonlight, to the earthworms revelling in the lawn, you celebrate your own quick heartbeat. But below all that there’s another sound, a ground swell, a drone, you can’t get rid of it. It’s the guns, which have never stopped, just moved around. It’s the guns, still firing monotonously, bored with themselves but deadly, deadlier, deadliest, it’s the guns, an undertone beneath each ordinary tender conversation. Say pass the sugar and you hear the guns. Say I love you. Put your ear against skin: below thought, below memory, below everything, the guns.