Brian Turner

plunge into the cold rushing white water my eyes blurred hard under the sun's interrogations cheney's hands like a preacher's deliver me deeper into the truth with a gasp of air a flash of light to be plunged back down the way he offers midges and bloodworms and rusty scuds to the cloudy river running fourteen hundred cubic feet per second until i cough up the fictional and beg for the heartland's fluid clarity

salvation the charity of forgiveness anything to unravel the dream and return me back my california bed my lover beside me and not this stale man's breath clinging to the egyptian cotton sheets the hanging curtains the flaring light of colorado springs where cheney slept in this very bed both of us held by the same coiling box spring goose-down pillows cupping our heads gently into sleep

the reddening glow of Mars rising over the horizon, dead skin sloughed off to coat my own skin at an invisible level.

And still, what does it say about me that the Pinot Grigio tasted so good on my tongue and that I struggled to be a sergeant tonight, speaking to the officer corps in a theater filled with 1,600 listening faces as I spoke about rape, death, and murder?

What does it say about me that I can return to Cheney's room after midnight,

strip my clothes off to curl in the bed where he too has slept the sheets a sublime reprieve from my tired frame the night a perfection of sleep

So it's a complicated sentence.

That's one sentence.

I wanted it similar to the way Dick Cheney likes to fish, or he liked to fish.

I don't know.

I'm sure he still does it.

The idea of throwing the line out as we poets do.

I wanted to do one long throw.

I mean, there's many breaths it takes, but the basic idea was to throw it out like a line and reel it in.

Yeah.

Because these are poems written five, you know, poems are published five years later.

No, I hope not.

Although there are people who say you can't write about, there can be no poetry after Auschwitz and things like that.

And I'm not sure if that was the full, if that's true to the full extent of that quotation.

Because that quotation was in context.