The Iowa Review

Barnhart, Graham

26 graham barnhart
Cultivating Mass
Let the peaceful young men work 
their bis and tris.   
  Let’s not begrudge 
them their beach muscle. 
This is not bitterness. Please, let them 
 never imagine their Clean and Press 
 
   is a casualty raised 
up and over 
 a Humvee’s up-armor. 
Let them never know a body 
 weighs more unconscious 
   or consider that barbells are built 
to be lifted, our bodies 
   to lie down.  
 Today I can deadlift four-oh-five.
When I can move four-ten 
that will not stop a bullet 
   or 
                   the overpressure of a bomb 
flooding some tightened space, 
never mind 
        the shrapnel and heat careening 
through that rapid bloat
 ripping—
the iowa review 27
But if lifting is not a prayer 
 why do my knees hurt?
  Why lunge genuflections 
in fifty-yard intervals
 if not to make less fragile these legs  
  I beg to keep? 
If the consecration of chalk buckets
 is not a blessing 
 then the measured 
tearing down of my tissue, the shallow 
scarring of its muscle,
  is not teaching this body reverence 
to whatever 
 is in it that tells it—cohere. 
    
  But I say this is faith, 
I am learning 
 to tighten myself together
 and knowing 
the little good it will do.
Let the peaceful young men believe
 for awhile longer
  anything otherwise. 


English

Cultivating Mass

32 graham barnhart
Days of 2009
This is the one where he leaves her, wrecks his sister’s car after ten 
hours to Pittsburgh to see a girl who refuses because he seems empty. 
And this is the one where he knots his shoulders over flashcards like 
a fire in the frozen barracks. The one where he watches the inaugura-
tion online whispering Arabic to himself. This is the one before his 
first war. This is the one where he grows thankful to God on the long 
stretch of Virginia pike, where he finds heaven is Highway 77 south-
bound slack between mountains where nothing quits, and the massive 
hills are frozen at dusk, black waves full of terrible promise. This is the 
one where he’s thankful for heaven and hateful that it can only exist 
between things. This is the one where he learns how to savor guilt, how 
to make it last. The one when Charleston and DC and Pittsburgh rise 
and recede like sewing needles, the one where he passes out in the pews 
of St. Matthew, and thinks he’s never seen anything so bright, so bright 
but not blinding. It’s the one where he is wrong and the one where he 
learns to guess what he’ll long for before he gives it up, and this is the 
one where he gives. 


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