Literary Determinism.

Ritterbusch, Dale E.

 Literary Determinism
 I have looked over the wall and I see the bodies floating on the river,
and that will be my lot also.--Gilgamesh
   Teaching Conrad, Heart of Darkness,
   I go cold in the classroom,
   students texting, tweeting,
   whatever the hell it's called, some just sitting there
   blankly, without their books, so when I draw
   their attention to a specific passage
   they haven't got a clue--It's all for nothing,
   so few educable, it's merely a tactical exercise:
   What you do in training you'll do in combat
   is the old adage from the Army
   so I have few expectations the world will change,
   no matter the journey: up the Congo River,
   the Mekong, the Euphrates, the lesson
   never changes. I make all the parallels I can
   but only Robertson knows, an Iraq War vet,
   deployed two tours, mechanized infantry
   in continuous combat. He tells me after class
   of a checkpoint hit by a suicide bomber, the car
   explodes in a gasoline fireball, takes out
   the NCO, the lieutenant, wounds the other three:
   soldiers torn apart, but still alive and captured.
   A few days later Robertson hauls them from the river,
   the Euphrates giving up its dead
   as it always has, always will, a thousand years
   from now, just a few more lines written
   under a gritty Mesopotamian sun,
   sand cutting like broken glass in the wind.
   His voice lowers as he tells me
   the story, the image fixed, unchanging,
   as the world casts lots, the river, the epic,
   altered but slightly, the outcome, the house of dust
   always the same, and so he has little left to say,
   and we grow quiet, putting on that knowledge
   of where they drink dirt and eat stone.
   He looks away; I can tell he sees
   that dumb beast rising from the sand. 

A contributing editor to WLA, DALE RITTERBUSCH is the author of two collections of poetry, Lessons Learned and Far From the Temple of Heaven.