The Green Man

A poem about war, mythology, and becoming part of the landscape.

Note: This poem began as an outtake from my chapbook, “Interrogation Days” (Dead Mall Press, 2022). I have since revised and expanded the poem considerably, but it’s still deeply rooted in that project. You can read or download the chapbook here, and you can find an interview I did about it here. A few notes follow the poem.

Clockwise from upper left: an image of growth overtaking an abandoned village; a stone image of the Green Man on a church; an aerial photo of the Green Zone in Baghdad; a depiction of Khidr, the Green One.

The Green Man

1.

If we didn’t poison it, gouge it, cut it apart,
greenness would bleed through everywhere.

Eating sunlight, the leaves and tendrils
would cover sidewalks, parking lots, stoplights.

Everything confuses in that greenness, 
all we love and fear. Look too deeply

and wires spark, neurons char. You reach out
for a heart inside it. Then you feel what hides. 


2.

In the Europe of Crusaders, the Green Man 
was a god of vegetation. On churches & pubs, 

he faded into surroundings. When you saw him, 
each detail began rhyme: what had been cut 

burst forth, what was lost was everywhere. 
The Wild Man, Jack in the Green, Osiris 

(whose green limbs lay scattered on the earth). 
The stone faces stare back. Everything is listening.  

 
3.

In weeds, one looks for what hides. 
In Ohio, the corn field's green waves 

whisper with poison. A childhood friend 
come home from Iraq. Tattoos everywhere: 

cartoon bodies of stillborn infants circled
with syringes and razors; his own face torn apart--

every image is a wound's dead dream. 
His soul reaches out from his skin. And seethes.


4.

Head split in half and glued back together, 
the Green Man sprouts vines, grasses, acanthus. 

His skin shatters, flaring like a bright green sun.
The world is dreamed up again each day 

amid confusion, half-rhyme, coincidence. 
The Green Zone is an oasis in America’s hell.

There are no answers. One’s roots spread out 
through a soil of errors. The static begins to flower. 


5.

How far past the edge will you allow it?
As a boy, Al-Zarqawi dreamed only of war,
	
of Saladin driving the Lion Heart back. 
In prison, covered in tattoos, he was called

“The Green Man.” The Quran changed him. 
The other inmates watched as he took a razor 

and erased hell from his skin. A soul gone 
past ink, blood, images. Past anything that lives.    


6.

The mind grows sick of guessing. 
In annihilation, it seeks a total clarity.

Imagination stares down at its small body 
crumpled in a heap. About its chest, the chakra’s 

pulsing light grows dim. A strange hand 
reaches, removes the heart, and squeezes a drop 

of think, black liquid into a styrofoam cup. 
What can anybody do? The sirens have begun.


7.

A heart should go insane in such a place.
One can’t help falling in love with fractures, 

with the shifting faces of the disaster.
I talk about it like I’m no one. Imagine I am.

Imagine Khidr, the Green One, who aids the lost:
an angel and guide, twin and stranger. He says,

"Your image is in eternity." He says, "First, there is 
no such thing as dream. Then, there is nothing else." 


8.

It's late. The battle is already everywhere.
You can see billions of years of green life 
 
compressed into a market for black fuel. 
In that mirror, futures shatter. We poison it

until even the glitches rhyme. We can't help
dreaming the days just to get lost inside them, 

to fade into the scenery. All that we love and fear. 
The dreadful tapestry, the bright green sun.


*

Notes & Reflections

As stated above, this poem began as an outtake from my chapbook, Interrogation Days, and it continues in that book’s mode, which is quite different from other work I’ve shared here. The poems are largely about the US invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, and in that context some of the references here may seem less unexpected than when the poem stands alone. This poem, like the larger project, operates through collage and juxtaposition, trying to enact the psychic disturbance caused by excesses of meaning and eruptions of dream into history (and vice versa).

The poem is a risk, in all honesty. That is, I wrote it because I got lost inside it. Being confused but captivated, following strange paths and fascinations, hearing rhymes and blurs, reaching toward something enormous but somewhat disturbing—these were the ways the poem came to be. This is why it didn’t make the cut in the book originally: it didn’t know what it was really about yet, and it became a kind of maze I was wandering around in. In other words, it enacts everything it talks about, at least in my experience of it. My hope is that it connects with others, too, and that they can find themselves drawn into its elliptical processes. But maybe it’s too hermetic, I don’t know. Sometimes the writer can’t really understand what their work is doing, and this is OK; in fact, the need to write only those things they understand can destroy them as artists. Ultimately, whether others relate to it or not, it is an artifact of some psychic process I underwent while writing Interrogation Days, and then later after it was published. Whatever it means to others, the bottom line is that it’s there, on the page/screen, and you can walk around inside it if you want.

A few notes:

• You can read more about the Green Man here and Khidr here. I am taking some liberties with both figures, but the basic facts are true to their lore. My main source for Khidr is the scholar Henry Corbin, who has written a lot on the mystical aspects of Islam.

• Al-Zarqawi was a member of Al-Qaeda and founded the group that became ISIS. This anecdote about the tattoos and his nickname, “the Green Man,” has been attested in a few sources, most prominently PBS Frontline.

• During the invasion of Iraq, the US took over Saddam’s palaces and central HQ. This heavily guarded and fortified area of Baghdad was known as “The Green Zone.” It became an image of how badly out-of-touch the US leaders were, sealed safely away in air-conditioned offices, in a simulation of the US itself, while civilians and soldiers on the ground experienced unspeakable violence and horror.

• The image of black liquid being squeezed from the heart alludes to a story about the youth of the Prophet Muhammad. My source for it is Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings. As Lings tells it, while the young Muhammad was in the desert, two strangers appeared, tackled him, removed his heart, drained a black liquid from it, and then disappeared. I’ve never been able to forget the image.

• The anecdote about my childhood friend’s tattoos is true. He had these specific images on him, and tattoos covered almost every inch of his body. We’ve lost track of each other for several years, but he was my closest friend during a crucial period in my teenage years—one of those friends who is simply a permanent part of your psyche. He served as a Marine during the invasion of Iraq, and he has since faced so much pain and loss that it’s almost inexplicable. Perhaps we’ll find our way back into each others’ lives some day. I hope he is well.