A Poem By Tomás Q. Morín

by Mark Bibbins, Editor

Extraordinary Rendition

for Philip Levine

When the CIA said, An extraordinary rendition
has been performed, I knew Lester Young
blowing his saxophone in that way he did
when Billie Holiday was a few feet away
smoking, singing “I Can’t Get Started,”
was not what they had in mind. No, the agent
at the podium talking to reporters
who spends most of his days staring
at computer screens riddled with numbers
and names and maps of places he’s never been
probably thought of a man in a hood
far from home swimming
in a room flooded with questions.

If the agent had children
to pick up from school after work
maybe he thought, in spite of his training,
of the hooded man’s daughter waking
to find her father gone, her mother
in pieces. What might never cross his mind
is how sometimes that same girl
or any one of a hundred others
might be imagining him
an ocean away, standing in a pressroom
in a charcoal suit, one size too big,
stammering to explain the state
of their nameless fathers one day, the wail
a drone makes the next. In her mind
and language “extraordinary rendition”
still means her mother humming
“Somebody Loves Me” with more heart
than anyone she’s ever heard
before or since. If you think the agent
and daughter will meet at the end of this poem
for the first time, then you’re wrong
because they met many years ago
when he closed his eyes
and the trumpet she presses against
her lips when she dreams entered his sleep
like a bird made of metal. Hungry
and not sure of what it saw, it plunged
toward the cut open chest
of our agent (it is always this way
in his dreams) as if diving into a lake
and then soared to a great height
from where it dropped his unbreakable heart
that whistled as it zipped past our windows
just before it hit the sidewalk.
Because this scene will repeat itself
for years, a therapist will one day say guilt,
forgiveness, and pain to our agent
to unsuccessfully explain how death,
when it comes from the sky, makes a music
so hypnotic you will never forget it,
a truth that has always been obvious
to the daughters of Honduras
and Ukraine, Palestine and St. Louis.

Tomás Q. Morín is the author of A Larger Country and the translator of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu.

You will find more poems here. You may contact the editor at [email protected].