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    When the Men Go Off to War: Poems
    When the Men Go Off to War: Poems
    When the Men Go Off to War: Poems
    Ebook73 pages33 minutes

    When the Men Go Off to War: Poems

    By Victoria Lynn Kelly

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    About this ebook

    Collecting the nationally-recognized poems of Victoria Kelly, When the Men Go Off to War captures the hopes, anxieties, and intimacies of the military spouse during a time of war. Written over the course of her husband’s deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, these haunting poems span vast geographical distances and generations, moving between the literal and the fanciful to find community in the midst of isolation. Kelly blends lyric and narrative elements to evoke themes of loneliness and human fragility with keen insight. But ultimately, When the Men Go Off to War is a heartrending ode to enduring romance and the reclamation of a marriage tested by loss and separation.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaval Institute Press
    Release dateSep 15, 2015
    ISBN9781612519050
    When the Men Go Off to War: Poems

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      Book preview

      When the Men Go Off to War - Victoria Lynn Kelly

      PART ONE

      DEPARTURE

      WHEN THE MEN GO OFF TO WAR

      What happens when they leave

      is that the houses fold up like paper dolls,

      the children roll up their socks and sweaters

      and tuck the dogs into little black suitcases.

      Across the street the trees are unrooting,

      the mailboxes rising up like dandelion stems,

      and eventually we too float off,

      the houses tucked neatly inside our purses, and the children

      tumbling gleefully after us,

      and beneath us the base has disappeared, the rows

      of pink houses all the way to the ocean—gone,

      and the whole city has slipped off the white earth

      like a table being cleared for lunch.

      We set up for a few weeks at a time

      in places like Estonia or Laos—

      places where they still have legends,

      where a town of women appearing in the middle of the night

      is surprising but not unheard of. The locals come to watch

      our strange carnival unpacking in some wheat field

      outside Paldiski—we invite them in for coffee,

      forgetting for a minute

      that some of our own men won’t come home again;

      and sometimes, a wife or two won’t either.

      She’ll meet someone else, say, and

      it’s one of those things we don’t talk about,

      how people fall in and out of love—

      and also, what the chaplains are for.

      And then, a few days before the planes fly in,

      we return. We roll out the sidewalks and make the beds,

      tether the trees to the yard.

      On the airfield, everything is as it should be—

      our matte red lipstick, the babies blanketed inside strollers.

      Only, our husbands look at us a little sadly,

      the way people do when they know

      they have changed but don’t want to say it.

      Instead they say, What have you been doing all this time?

      And we say, Oh you know, the dishes,

      and they laugh and say,

      Thank God some things stay the same.

      THE HOTEL

      We lived by the ocean, next to an old hotel

      where ladies went when summer was still

      a verb—to play croquet, to get married. Eighty

      years ago a rich man jumped from a sixth-floor

      window; now there are rumors of ghosts, of bellhops

      who appear in the stairwell, warning guests away.

      One night in winter, when the hotel was closed,

      we found ourselves in the lobby, drunk and tired,

      and crept along the corridor imagining the paint

      when it was slick and there were men in smoking

      jackets milling about after dinner. They didn’t know

      what was coming, did they, those beautiful travelers—

      waiting for wives to sign their perfumed letters

      before descending to the ballroom, the glass doors

      flung open toward the sea and the salt air pungent as

      wild roses. How magnificent it must have been

      to

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