The Foreign Correspondent

Progressive, The, July, 1999 by Joel Brouwer

   kneels in red dust to unpack his camera.
   Swarms of children, bellies swollen with air,
   poke his ridiculous pale skin. The dead

   are piled at the edge of town, awaiting
   the Red Cross backhoe. Someone's thrown a dog
   on top of the heap. The correspondent focuses

   on a woman's slack face. Her earrings glare,
   and he stoops to remove them.
   He once believed his job was only to see,

   to be a third eye for those of us hungry for more
   than a meager pair can provide. He would haunt
   the world, its cardboard slums and firefights,

   its brambled clearings where hooded men
   dump bones on moonless nights, snapping fact
   after fact for our review. But he soon learned

   the ropes: skip the fill-flash
   and the starving man's eyes sink back
   into poignant shadow. The beggar with one coin

   in his cup has more punch than the cripple with ten.
   If the earrings glare, unhook them.
   Years ago, to celebrate his first assignment,

   he gave his wife a pair of diamond earrings
   and she asked him to put them in. His hands shook
   at the intimacy of it--the down on pink flesh,

   the delicate wound. That same night she gave him
   a stainless steel canteen: "For my photographic
   Marco Polo." On the way to the airport he stopped

   to bang the flask against a flagpole, scour away
   its greenhorn shine with pebbles and dirt. Now he pinches
   this empty ear in his fingers, twists the bright clasp.

Joel Brouwer is a recipient of a 1999 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in creative writing. His first book of poems, "Exactly What Happened," is forthcoming from Purdue University Press.3