Battery O'Rorke

I most recently puzzled over a collection of poems by G.C. Waldrep, called Disclamor. It took quite a bit of puzzling to make any kind of sense of his nine “Battery” poems, which use nine military fortifications on the California coast as inspiration. One such poem, “Battery O’Rorke,” is arranged like the others, in a broken style of uneven stanzas containing lines that are indented to varying degrees. The poem laments the brevity of the feeling of security created by a big slab of cement along the coast. The opening line “What is written here fades quickly./ Faces drawn in chalk/ names,/ the idea/ of defense…” suggests this. The poet clearly feels that war is no long-term solution, that the positive feelings evoked by a battle won will fade with time.
The poet feels that war is one example of “what the body can be made to do” and it feels to me as if he doesn’t know how to express both the wonderful and horrendous things that humans are capable of, especially in the same poem. Throughout the poem, he grapples with the question of how to write about things that are simply too big. He is tackling a huge issue when he writes about war, but equally as difficult is the concept of an ocean. How does one even begin to address it all? The poet concludes by writing, “The beach ignores the power of words/ as words ignore the power of things./ O stranger.” And so he leaves us to wonder how all this stuff can somehow coexist in our big world.