Graywolf Press released Tom Sleigh’s House of Fact, House of Ruin alongside his essays, The Land Between Two Rivers: Writing in an Age of Refugees, this “land” being Somalia, Kenya, and the region of the Middle East once known as Mesopotamia. The places to which he travels are pitched on the edge of catastrophe or living in the anguished limbo of its aftermath; places, according to Sleigh, affiliated with “disaster porn,” or with the commodification and vicarious pleasure in the suffering of human beings. More a narrative poet than Joudah, Sleigh’s narrative or narratives often co-exist with multiple threads of partial stories further unraveled and enriched by a humor self-aware enough to recognize the speaker’s own unimportance, an attitude that amplifies the reader’s commitment to trusting him. The magnificent and brutal “My Tiger,” from the Second Section of Part One, depicts the speaker’s confinement in the capsulized space of an MRI machine:
He tells me this will take a while: would I prefer a sedative…?
then leaves the room and the jackhammering
of the machine fills the voids in my skull.
Immobile on the table, I feel like that stuffed
tiger nailed tail-first to the wall of an artist pal,
my head dangling down resting on a stool.
Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” “tearing
me all apart” echoes in the armored vehicle again.
Why don’t soldiers in the field play Bach?
If you’re a tiger, though, maybe you like Hendrix
more, maybe Hendrix “shooting me down”
gets closer to the condition of sweating in your flak jacket
while some NGO geek yammers on and on about
food aid not getting through?….
The literal situation puts the speaker in the vulnerable, claustrophobic space of the MRI capsule and quickly the ‘jackhammering / of the machine’ leads first to a self-likeness with a stuffed, emasculated tiger in an ‘artist pal’s place.’ Critical is the identification of artist as ‘pal,’ a low-brow, common word. From there it’s a slingshot hurl to that armored vehicle in a war zone and the kind of logic that makes sense in a terrifying situation: why Hendrix, not Bach? Except the tiger is back again, and Sleigh, who is compelled by these great cats, needs to align himself with the tiger even if the tiger must “disdain to look at me, me / a goof of a tiger…” Almost immediately, he is back (in memory) at a security checkpoint and being searched with the “smooth barrels of [the male and female soldiers’] AKs pressed into my back…” For Sleigh, the shift to Browning’s Childe Roland and the declaration that “Oh, the knights and horses all lie slain, / their lemans sitting grieving beside them,” seems almost inevitable given the unfolding madness of “the secret torture chamber” and “a grenade sail[ing] through / the air and explod[ing] right in front of me.” Through it all, “The tiger sits there licking / its paws…” until the closing “post-coital” look of “post-battle” finds “my tiger turn[ing] his head away, / made shy by the face of so much bliss.” If ever a word has found its antithesis, it is here. Sleigh’s poems listen. Little wonder then that “My Tiger” quotes the end of Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale.” True to Keats’s emphasis on negative capability, Sleigh’s poems exist, not comfortably, but nonetheless they exist, they listen, and they demonstrate that it is only by staying fully present, even in extremis, that one human being can even hope to engage another’s suffering.