The Disappearing Man

The Disappearing Man

Can a tragic hero die every night on a bridge between

Baghdad Island Amusement Park and Camp Taji?

The stark, potholed road through the abandoned park,

poetics of its space like a sci-fi set, a lost desert planet, home

now to stray dogs, its hundred-fifty-foot central tower

a giant's golf tee with round top deck a prime place for a sniper

I always thought, ‘til that week the man on the bridge

died every night, and we took bolt cutters to the chained

metal door, walked all those tower stairs up to the sky-high

observation deck, the elevator with no power for years,

looking for shell casings, any sign of whoever was killing

the man on that bridge we could see clearly in daylight

beyond the park's looted and crippled rides -- just the palms

left whole -- on the brown-ribbon tributary of the Tigris,

while every night the Iraqi Army sent out a new man to walk

the boards to the chair midway across the flat bridge,

where he would rise to stop the occasional car, flash

a light on papers, wave it by to make the turn before

the East Gate of Taji, only this week, he would rise

to his death every night -- his only doubt could be

what hour of the night it would come.

We did not ask why the Iraqis kept sending him out, or

why he was there -- the one car bomb that hit the gate,

the driver just blew past him -- the East-Gate approach

was their command, we only sent our team into the tower

to wait in the soft night wind and watch that man die,

look for the muzzle flash, until two nights later our soldiers

found a black-clad sniper in the trees on the Tigris's sloping

bank, the red scarf around his neck wet from wiping brow

and eye in the humid river musk, waiting for the moonlight

and rise of the man on the bridge, and we -- with his rifle

shifting toward us -- we did to him what men do

in war.

And after the shots, after he found himself still standing,

with what relief the man on the bridge must have sat

back down in that chair,

Waiting, looking now, for morning's sun.

Steven Croft

An Army combat veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia on a property lush with vegetation. He has recent work in Willawaw Journal, Sky Island Journal, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Third Wednesday, Red Eft Review, San Pedro River Review, Poets Reading the News, Gyroscope Review, and other places.