Jaime Robles
DECORATIONS
In the confusion of wartime in which we are caught up, relying as we
must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes
that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a
glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as
to the significance of the impressions which bear down upon us and as to
the value of the judgements which we form.
– Sigmund Freud,
‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, 1915
The Hoard is remarkable for the extraordinary quantity of sword fittings.
Most are of gold and many are beautifully inlaid with garnets.
– Online description of the Staffordshire Hoard, 2011
must on one-sided information, standing too close to the great changes
that have already taken place or are beginning to, and without a
glimmering of the future that is being shaped, we ourselves are at a loss as
to the significance of the impressions which bear down upon us and as to
the value of the judgements which we form.
– Sigmund Freud,
‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, 1915
The Hoard is remarkable for the extraordinary quantity of sword fittings.
Most are of gold and many are beautifully inlaid with garnets.
– Online description of the Staffordshire Hoard, 2011
The arm lifting out of the water
is a woman’s, smooth and pale.
Clear water peeling from her skin
like an envelope of blue air amid black.
It could only be a woman’s: signifying
the sword is a gift not a challenge.
The arm, which has no body no
face although we know the bearer
of weapons is beautiful beyond
resistance, slides under the surface
of the water, which like silence
is mutable. The story goes no farther,
heading as it is along the wrong path.
• •
[Zoomorphic]
Birmingham Museum Accession Number: K0652
Gold plate, one of two birds
twisted away, awry
traces of talons on the fish’s body.
wild cranes and storks
Likely it’s the decoration on a shield:
two eagles holding a fish between them.
The raptors’ hooked beaks,
following a circular and multiple path,
feathers flattened into a disc, a plowed field,
a ghost house
… deserting by twos and threes
every night
... rifles propped against
the nearest thorn tree …
the metal beaten into a maze
the paths of which never intersect:
one never leads into another,
even though there is a center
a succession of pestilential huts
and, separated by fields of corn,
carcasses of livestock
I knew hunger briefly in a
prison in Darfur.
• •
[Millefiori means one
thousand flowers]
Birmingham Museum Accession Number: K0545
A small stud,
surrounded by gold and garnets,
the central gem –
27 mm in diameter by 8.7 mm wide –
In one of the villages near by,
a house was in flames
fabricated of glass
… fired into the air
Its pattern a checkerboard – black and white,
white the color of bone, not snow –
the stud’s central core inverted,
as if the black-armed cross had its heart scooped out,
then became its opposite,
rotated through space and time:
sticks of charred wood
... soldiers everywhere,
some wore masks
... others didn’t ...
a bone white cross on a burnt black field
… we hid in the forests …
• •
[Millefiori means one
thousand flowers]
Birmingham Museum Accession Number: K0545
Investigators in Kosovo have unearthed
the bodies of seven ethnic Albanian
children, aged between four and twelve,
who had all been executed at
close range.
An old man died of exhaustion
• •
All battles are fought reflected
in a shield, the warrior naked except
for helmet and boots, his skin impenetrable
as marble. The boots are magical.
The earth flows back from their touch
like a cushion of water loosed and vibrant,
suddenly blurred in the glow of such touch.
The target too is blurred: what is seen
in the shield is not what is seen in
a mirror, though the target and
the warrior are swappable, the one
twinning the other. When one looks at
the other face-on the stroke of the blade
freezes mid swing.
• •
[Rubber bullets]
Birmingham Museum Accession number: K0453
angular as arrows
straight legged
spears and swords
shields
breasts
a fragment of silver plate
In profile she looks as if
she tried to swallow an egg:
it got stuck somehow on the wrong
side of her teeth and sank,
the mound rising out of the jaw
half way between her chin
and ear. The top of the dome
is abraded, the whole area mottled
pink, flushed and dark
broken
from a helmet perhaps
and tarnished
• •
[God is great]
Birmingham Museum Accession Number: K0303
The large red red stone, shaped and polished –
cabochon, named for the crown of the
human head – sits central,
at the intersection of the cross’ arms.
Twisted wires of gold curl outward.
Sprouting along each planetary direction.
They took her to the cemetery,
like the others,
at night.
... her name written
on the shroud,
Nuha al Manal
The red red stone flattened, as if the head were shorn,
tiny chips worn smooth.
Inclusions are visible
at 10 x 6 magnification and
thin lines can be seen at the back
of the red red stone,
possibly from a cracking paste below
They cluster around the wrapped body,
He sucks in her death like a bee –
Or is it his life that he tries to press into her,
through skin’s barrier?
In the green light of infrared film,
they bury their dead.
• •
[Pommel: (L. little apple)]
Birmingham Museum Accession Number: K0652
This pommel of gold inlaid with garnets,
cloisonné walls around the stones carved
into scaly geometries, and underneath
the clear and semi-precious red,
a modicum of foil to bounce back
light’s warmer tones: counterweight apple
balancing the sword, poised at the end
of the blade’s tang.
This is exactly how it happened.
On the 26th of July, I arrived in Zepa,
about 3:00 in the afternoon.
On the 29th, Zepa fell.
... imagine all those voices
• •
[Peace bands]
Birmingham Museum Accession Number: K0462
Years earlier, during the Soviet war,
I had traveled secretly by foot with
Shuaib across many of the precipitous
mountain passes we could now see
leading from Pakistan into the Afghan
interior.
The interior of the pyramid,
which is fashioned from gold,
is difficult to discern
through the cloisonné stones
and blue glass.
In the mountains your feet bind you to the earth,
you drift –
tumble upward into sky –
and fall
With our gear loaded onto mules
and horses, we walked
unfastened
by day and by night, covering hundreds
of miles.
A bar attached across the back,
to tie to
– adorn –
a scabbard’s leather strap.
The straps lace over
the pyramid’s bar, wrap
around the handle of the sword,
to prevent the warrior
from drawing it
in sudden anger
You gotcher war
It’s a fact a life
You gotcher war
It’s a fact a life
... then I saw the young Afghan,
barely twenty yards away, crawling
along the ground. He had stepped
on an antipersonnel mine. His
mangled foot was amputated on
the spot by the French doctors, and
he was dispatched back to Pakistan
for medical care.
Such elaborate and expensive decoration
You gotcher war
It’s a fact a life
You gotcher war
It’s a fact a life
It’s a fact
a life
Copyright © Jaime Robles 2016
Jaime Robles has two books of poetry from Shearsman Books, Anime Animus Anima (2010) and Hoard (2013) and numerous chapbooks from various presses. A visual artist as well as a writer, she recently completed a short film mixing imagery with three poems about Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Her visual books are in collections at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Beinecke Library, Yale University; and the Oulipo Archive in Paris, among others. She holds a doctorate in Creative Writing from the University of Exeter, UK, and works as a librettist and reviewer of opera, dance, theatre and poetry. Her bookworks and installations can be viewed at jaimerobles.com.