Phantom Noise by Brian Turner

Brian Turner served for seven years in the US Army. He was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq from November 2003 with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999-2000 he was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division. His poetry was included in the Voices in Wartime Anthology published in conjunction with a feature-length documentary film. His collection Here, Bullet (Bloodaxe Books, 2007) was first published in the US by Alice James Books in 2005, where it has earned Turner nine major literary awards, including a 2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2007 NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry. In 2009 he was given an Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship.

Brian Turner's first book of poems Here, Bullet, was a harrowing, first-hand account of the Iraq war by a soldier-poet. In Phantom Noise he faces and tries to deal with the traumatic aftermath of war

Guarding the Bomber

His legs gone, bandaged at midfemur,
he palms the invisible above him like a conductor
in difficult passages of fluorescent streaming light,
two gauze-wrapped stumps directing movement
from his shoulders as I wipe salt from his lips
with a wet rag, check the feeding tube, the IV
in his neck, listen to his morphined Arabic
as I imagine him lying in debris
and settling dust, his brain snapping back
into momentary consciousness, realizing
that his feet – fastened in their sandals –
wait for him across the room, and that his hands –
driven beyond the body – still negotiate
black wires and hot wires, arming
explosives in a 155mm shell casing,
his body unable to sweat as he works
beyond me and my thoughts of his Paradise,
wondering if the virgins will care for him
as I do, changing his bedpan, bathing him
with sponges and reassurances in English –
a language he hates, its vowels
a sheen of oil on steel – no,
he's far beyond my rifle and desert fatigues,
his dexterous ghost limbs tending the fire,
and whether I want to admit it or not
the explosives continue around him, his arms
elbow-deep in the blue flame and heat,
reaching in to save me.

Aubade: Layover in Amsterdam

My lover turns in the California bedroom's
watery dark, arching her back from that slow

smooth glissando of heat within flesh,
our bodies rising on coiled springs

as if riding a wave of tension,
the room beneath us fading, my head leaning back,

eyes closing to the bright points of light,
my mouth filling with a long vowel

lifting into moonlight, the jet stream
blowing through my hair, the earth curving below;

rising over the cold waters of the Atlantic
to 30,000 feet, I begin to sense the imminent

descent toward the Red Lights of Amsterdam,
the clock reversing itself to the spring of 2004,

where I lie with a woman who knows
I'm a man heading back to war,

and I want her to whisper in my ear,
even in a language I've never heard before,

just to hear another human voice, just to breathe in the dark.

The Whale

It is 1970
and the summer of love is over.

I am three years old, barefoot,
running along the surf
near Florence, Oregon,

where an eight-ton sperm whale
beached itself and died, the carcass
rotting now,
an entrance carved into its massive flank
for cases of dynamite, 500 pounds of explosives
necessary to rend open the interior
so scavengers can pick the skeleton clean –

but for me, it is the doorway to another world,
the body of the sacred I might enter into,
its eyes drained of all but a giant benevolence,
flukes wide as the tailfins of bombers
overhead, my mother

hoisting me to her hip as engineers argue
blasting caps and stand-off distance,
equations to undo the intricate puzzle
of muscle and bone –

the way life waits for us all
with great patience, the electrons orbiting
in their shells like distant planets we never see,
the constellations which bind the universe
undone this day, at least for this one body
beached on the sand as we witness the blast
from the sawgrass dunes,

the sudden
jolt of nerves as the body absorbs
the shockwave, beach-sand shot upward
in jets of tissue and meat,
the local news reporter dropping to his knees
to cover his head with a clipboard
while the cameraman does the same,
my mother shielding me with her torso
turned away from the blast

and I remember everyone smiling
afterward, laughing, each of us amazed
the day a god was blown to pieces on the beach
and we all walked away from it, unscathed.

• TS Eliot prize for poetry
• Poetry
• Awards and prizes
• TS Eliot prize for poetry 2010
• extracts

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