Poetry Feature:
'Only the Dead': Vietnam

 

The Crone Recants

Let us swear off love;
we've had enough of private anguish.
Let us, like men, take on external ills:
the soot in factories, the unborn child.
Let us mete out justice to remorseless killers
and stack loaves for the dictator's orphans.

Oh, this is the stepmother's specious wisdom,
aging bride of idle comfort,
conferred on the spinster charge,
spoken to dissuade her from the feminine onus
and recast the world into benighted disarray.

For what heart that waits with full engagement
is not conscribed to tend the casualties at home,
when the cannons are pumped empty of their semen lead
and hoary-headed veterans weep openly
for their sons' abandoned promise?
 

Nicholas Johnson
Point of Honor

If I loved honor more, there'd be more dead people.
My father's shotgun would have been used,
not just on himself or as an impressive wall ornament.
If I loved honor more, there'd be more people hurt
for stupid reasons. My wife would have been shot
in the act, her lover in the back, all
because of an exchange of bodily fluids.
Yes, she'd have come to me with her legs and knees
all bandaged up, asking for money and forgiveness --
the things I'm running out of. If I loved honor more,
I'd have done my full stint in my jet fighter,
shot anything that moved, and not felt bad about it.
I'm still not clear on all the points of honor.
I was stupid for a long time -- longer than I was married,
longer than I hoisted a flag. Take a look around. Look
how many are dead. If honor had been involved,
there would have been more: Fisticuffs. Duels. Seconds.
Honor has made people happier than alcohol.
Hell, if honor were really involved, there would no World
Trade Center left at all. No business as usual. Me,
I'm sick of bodily fluids and scrapings things off
after C-4's done its work. I'm sick of the air
that insults our lungs, and all that's thrown at us
on the evening news. We should know better than to
consume ourselves and moralize. Thank God for death.
The ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes
we don't even know. The enemy is a shadowy character.
There are too many silent partners. Buddy, I know
because I was one of them for a long time. Like most men,
I've borne my share of coffins down, but if I had to
choose, I'd rather listen to a band no one had to march to.

(Prior publ.: Poetry Wales)
 

Dave King
I am the Dead of Pepper Pike, Ohio

Let me describe myself from the boy's perspective:
dark-haired, with pimples and a long jaw. The boy
did not consider me interesting, but what do boys know?

         The earth was green where we lived, the sky was blue --
         except when skies turned silver from Thanksgiving
         to Easter. Then the earth was a constant white.

I wasn't even the favorite babysitter. That would be Bruce,
a handsome kid who wrestled with him and picked him up.
It was Bruce who swung him 'til he could no longer stand.

         In the place I died, the colors were green and green
         and green and orange-green. Of course, the sky was blue.
         Here are smells: dampness, wood smoke, napalm, food, exhaust.

The boy and I left each other alone. His father was away,
and his mother thought male sitters were a good idea.
A similar logic made me a soldier.

         In Ohio, I had no girlfriends, but in Bangkok I got laid.
         Boot camp and high school were things I got through, and all the time
         I had my secrets. I had plans and wishes, just like anybody else.

I was a kid! I raided their refrigerator. I was tongue-tied
with the boy and with his mother. I never went abroad except for once.
I wasn't shot, I was run down by a tank. A quiet day, a U.S. tank!

         One strange thing, though: Bruce died, too. Car crash. Funny
         he and I should be the boy's first deaths. So I made an impression,
but still: there are others who remember me for more than my jaw.
 

Robert Klein Engler
Collateral Damage

The state sets up long rows of concrete chairs.
We knew in Vietnam that babies died.
With Zyklon gas, napalm and ash of hairs,
If you are keeping score, I guess we're tied.
The scholars say our Civil War was won,
But who divines the threads of terror's web?
It's May, the baseball season's just begun,
So, please, don't raise the ghost of Johnny Reb.
While polls shift left and right, we wait for bells
That tell again of horror wrecked by one.
Some say we lost our way. Some say death sells.
His stare is steel, then cold. Our job is done.
         More blood will never bring an end to blood--
         The second end is fire, the first was flood.
 

Matthew Laufer
To a Friend Before His Going to West Point (1969)

At the Point, ambition intersects with policy,
action gets in the way of thought
when blood must execute,
orders are cut, and "higher powers" have cut them.
Change the system from inside?
Prisons and protocol are stony inside and out.
Ceremonial scabbards and spit-polished pride
cannot disguise a truth that smells of death.
Men have acted strange--
and not always bravely strange--
when they've obeyed the patriot that's in them.
 

Catherine MacArthur
Brother's War

When you returned that summer
after Vietnam
living in the basement
under my room

you sang ballads at night
and guzzled whiskey,
running water in the sink,
neighing like a horse.

One night you carried
a dead, bleeding cat
that had been hit by a car
and slept with it.

Sometimes you arrived
at 3AM, climbing up stairs,
our parents calling your name,
peering through curtains, doors.

As if in a theatre, half asleep
I lay in bed, waiting for lights
to go out before rising for school.
Nights, in the next room,

fists pounding the kitchen table
or clutching a knife,
you leaned over Father
while Mother and I watched.
 

Alice Notley
II--The Person That You Were Will Be Replaced

In grief the person that you were is replaced by grief . . .
not the person you originally were but the one you'd become.

Grief is opportunistic and uncontrollable
         it doesn't exactly come
from you, you "allow it in"                  It's godlike
         as in possession.

This was the night I was the craziest: near my birthday,
four months after Ted's death, walking
on Second Avenue I thought "It's possible
he didn't really die." I felt a maniacal joy
and then became sickened and distressed
I knew a depth of me had, up to then, believed he was alive.
That depth was now emptied of him and filled with grief.

I dreamed all that year; I divided into dreamer and interpreter
         A gigantic horse blocks
         the entrance to
my building; I wake up and think "The horse is a hearse"
         blocking my life. Or
a dream with a dawn in it, the sky purple black,
but a hint of dawn, and when I awake I know it's the sky
in Lawrence's "Ship of Death" -- thin white
thread -- trying its way.

                                             If a self can
contain the deaths of others, it's very large;
it's certainly larger than my body
         If the other who dies is partly me,
and that me dies and another grows, the medium it grows in
         is grief.

The wish to locate absence, that contemporary obsession to
         find the empty present --
grief will saturate the present.

Grief isn't glandular; though becomes somatic;
gets far into your body. Eats it changes it.

One is magically struck down at certain
moments, can't move, can't arise,
and inside is poison; grief gets caught
in intensifying pockets which when opened
cause sensations of illness. On Christmas morning
I can't stand up.

If you immerse your feet in icy water
you forget grief for a moment. I did this once, my
brother-in-law made us cross a cold stream barefoot,
that winter, walking in the woods -- I was emptied, then elated,
blissful; but didn't try it again. Grief
returns vengeful after you've repulsed it.

(Reprinted with the author's permission from
Mysteries of Small Houses (Penguin, 1998).)
 

Hugh Seidman
Blood Lord

Who was it banged on the window?
emptied of dream, Blood Lord
I may speak it now
Blood Lord
his fingers are ropes, his heart
the long sought
perpetual engine, entropy zero, here
for we who have withheld

Last night
the color TV spanned pleasure
guerillas butchering cream
the latest whores and pimps
revising metaphysics
we were both on the great triple bed
were reclining like kings at apocalypse
enlightenment on all channels
guavas and pineapples
shitty little Christ fruit
spitting needles thru the meat
of three-year-olds on the Stone Age
Plain of Jars, corpses
on scanning scopes
in the air-conditioned cockpits
reconnaissance helicopters
automatic gun ships and bombers

There have been many subtle themes on this theme
the banality of shadows
shut from their sun
this is the boredom of history
but we sleep as the credits come
with a last kiss, a last
twisted dial to miss
nothing as we have not of our true work
our hands scouring sky to press us to
the sill's soot, the blue
edge where murderers pause
before paradise, the recoil
as the cabs halt or the elevators
fall so that millions
are assured and are sure again
that when the day is cleared
his switchblade will be pure
and will redeem them
 

Poem in Favor of the War

Women and the men, the guilty, who have hold
who are planed into my anger who postulate
penitence that I hate
in my allegiance to the martyrs who deserve
to take violence, that nobility
the dead lend to their hands
for forgiveness and I give them
the forgiveness of the gun

I had wanted to end murder
but compassion made me
the maniac of murder
and each day as on all days
I have argued in anguish it is true
that they beg, that the mind is pain
the ploughshare beaten back to sword
I know this is anger on the astral
I know but I am worthy now to know
I am worthy of what before me
was filth in their butchership

And I come to it having broken it
and I deal it as the sea
deals its orders for the armies
turning ardor to the blood wheel
and now I am for all crime and you
who are the platitudes, the X's
of morality, the geniuses of anus
it is I who raise entropy
it is I who leave no one
it is I who grind the teeth
of the armaments that the stars offer
to a seeker after vengeance

And now it is my time for redemption
as the body times spew for the cleansing
when the mothers jam a son to the nail
and the roses plead
adornment by the thorn
in their deaf art marking sentence
and as the sun burns, I mock and burn
and as the branch fans, I am wind
and as the child and the lovers lust, I love
and as the book is signed, I sign
I, Of Butchering
and as the Christ found, I have found
the continent and the blood river
holy unto butchering
 

1968-69

I sat in at Low Library, at Columbia, the first night: 3 A.M.
The police were to come but did not.
I had friends in SDS.
I knew no one in Vietnam.

An old lover walked arm in arm with another.
The revolution, I said, feminism, sexual politics.

I typed in my apartment on 104th Street, on a manual portable.
The hundreds of pages of the novel I did not write.
Someone will get it straight.

I drew dreams: spiders, fetuses in closets.
I marched against the war.
I debated a Green Beret and went on.

I read The Function of the Orgasm.
I loved Laurie Cohen.
Before that I programmed computers.
Before that I wept because I had nothing to do with my life.

That start of the poem.
The flame stirred by a wind past argument, money, or fame.
Burning, as it always burns.

But outside, the napalm burned,
Which the President denied, who signed his name.
Washington lied about the dead.

Then, I went West.
I saw Charles Manson on a bar TV.
I parked at Laurie Cohen's shut house, at the Golden Gate.
I waded the metallic sea light.

Now, we are N years late.
And that one, alive somewhere, her dark hair still in that wind, like flame

(The foregoing three works reprinted with the author's permission from Selected Poems: 1965-1995 (Miami University Press, Oxford, OH, 1995).)
 

Angelo Verga
Dreams of Sihanouk

Chaste sweet Sihanouk
blue helmeted coalition troops
& armless villains who salute
the legless, triumphant over landmines.
A gangling American president
& CEO's from 3 continents
clog the black onion fields,
fluttering like prayer wheels
across the river from Phnom Penh,
Khmer Rouge wave shimmering rifles & flags.
Spectral Pol Pot is felt
fleeing into the strangled jungle
on a Chinese bicycle, without tools or food.
We bring VCR's and take back
rubber, young rice, & girls.
In my wife's dream we are deaf,
large salaried men, big-intentioned, wide
legged fools, who can't sing French.
Sihanouk signals from his tassel festooned
podium tank. The sky turns white, then red.
 

Diaz, Foot Route #18, Carrier of Mail
30 Years, 3 Months, 2 Weeks

"In my dreams Vietnam is a river
A river of fire, and
Trees burning, buffaloes burning,
Women burning.
A fire so loud with eyes closed I still can hear it.
I can hear it chewing the banks of the river.
I did 19 months overseas, aged me 20 years."

He pulls a plastic vial from inside his shirt to show me
What he needs to sleep: Heart medicine? Prozac?
"Pot. Booze. And these," he says into my eyes.

"They help, but not much
It changes you to kill people every day
Even if you don't kill them, it changes you to see people killed
But I did, I did kill them
I killed buffaloes, I killed women, fish, birds
I killed anything that moved because I had to
Kill or be killed, you know what I mean?
At night you can't see 3 meters into the trees

Some Vietnamese moved into a building on my route
The first time I smelled fish heads cooking in the hallway
I saw the river blow up, blood gush, mud explode
I got sick, I got sick to my gut
I heaved black gunk I didn't know I still had in me
I saw myself running, young again, puking,
The river in flames, dead in the mud chewing their graves"
 

Dan Wilcox
Richard Nixon Must Die
(for all the victims of the war)

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!
Because the cure for cancer lies rotting in a rice paddy of Viet
Nam--
Because the next, best President of the United States has no legs
and is locked in a VA hospital in Buffalo--
Because the new Martin Luther King, the new Malcolm X got his
head blown off in Hue--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because the hope for world peace is crawling thru these streets
looking for a fix--
Because the answer to the World’s economy is busy selling her ass
on the neon highways of L.A.--
Because the way to feed the children of Africa disappeared in a
malnourished brain in Ethiopia--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because there is no hope for any of us, because it is all out of
control--
Because Wall St. is there, buys our Presidents, our Mayors, our
Congressmen--
Because the Declaration of Independence is enemy propaganda--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because campaign workers are paid to steal and rob instead of
sticking labels and dialing telephones--
Because our contributions now go for wiretaps and surveillance
instead of buttons and salaries--
Because especially the stay-at-home voters are holy, the salt of
the Earth, and the politicians are not--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because the FBI is listening right now, the CIA is listening
right now, the Tactical Police Force is on your line right
now--
Because you really can’t read everything you want and they have
already censored this line--
Because Lenny Bruce died for our sins--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because the townhouses of America are exploding around us--
Because of Watts, and Newark, and Miami, and Chicago--
Because every city is Chicago and Chicago is everycity--
Because our best minds are being taught the M-16 when they should
be playing guitars--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because America’s best children are dead, or lost underground, or
gone to Sweden, to Canada--
Because there are really no sacred places, the Indians' burial
mounds are breweries--
Because the state of poetry is not really a state but an occupied
territory--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because Tricia Nixon has the largest collection of stolen panties
in the Free World--
Because Pat Nixon is a raging nymphomaniac hiding in the body of
an aging Methodist Barbie doll--
Because America is sick of its rulers' televised weddings and
black-tie inaugurations--
Because when we really need him Lee Harvey Oswald is nowhere to
be found--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!

Because we no longer just know someone who has been raped but
have ourselves been raped--
Because even our bodies have been denied to us, to others, to the
future, and we are told "No, stop it, it's wrong"--
Because it is better to get power than to get laid--
Because when I kissed her she cried and cried because she wanted
me and she wanted to come and she couldn't let me--
Because when I wanted to love America I was told to go kill
someone I didn't even know--
Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must
Die!
 

Peace Marchers at the Vietnam Memorial

Who would have thought on the cold December in 1969 when we
met, my boots & I, that we'd be here in Washington, on
my birthday, marching against still another war?
We did not think then we would stand here, older now, more
worn, creased, grey showing at the fray
among other peace marchers who leave their signs on the lawn
to stand before this litany of stone
58,000 points of light etched into the blackness & now gone
out, not even a flicker
unless you count those here now, those who remember, who tell
their children
Vietnam, Cambodia, Kent State, Jackson State
who hug each other, who cry, who lean against the wall, find
names we have not forgotten, some never even known, in
the worn sole of memory.

When we low-crawled through that night assault exercise we
did not imagine this pilgrimage along the dusty stones
of the Mall
in still another grim age like when those on the Wall died--
it just goes on & on, from a jungle of politics to a desert
of values
Kuwait, Tel Aviv, Baghdad, Khafji.

Who would have thought when I applied those acres of black
polish I would be here to say "No" again
like that birthday when I sat in the latrine and cried for
loneliness, I don't want to have to do this, I want to
go home & celebrate my birthday.

We came here to wage war on War
Vermont, Albany, Boston, Toledo
to the Wall, to weep, to stare, to murmur, hushed as if the
dead were here
as indeed they are, in us, in this great crowd that even all
of them could be lost in.

Who would have thought, who would have thought -- at least
we, my boots & I, can still march
& when they're gone, I'll buy boots & boots for my children,
& keep on marching.
 

Rob Wright
In the Dusk Gray and Dim*
(on the eve of the Republican National Convention)

The republic hums sweetly. Helios are hovering,
roving, luminous, wide-eyed,
beating the brackish air in the near dark.

The sound reminds me, always, of Asian place names:
Play-ku, Mekong (betraying my age.)
The republic hums sweetly. Helios are hovering.

And Saigon, a conga line ascending heaven, suits and ties,
code books, The Elements of Style, pictures of wives,
beating the brackish air in the near dark.

Reporters suited up in jungle kit, microphones, rum-washed eyes,
while on camera, Bloods from Hood and Drum load one-o-five's.
The republic hums sweetly. Helios are hovering.

Pencil lines of jet vapor follow the fifteenth parallel,
packed to the gillies with bombs and greetings for l’Ecole Normale,
beating the brackish air in the near dark.

A friend was brought back zipped in plastic, except his lower half,
which was blown to atoms of bone and bladder.
The republic hums sweetly. Helios are hovering,
beating the brackish air in the near dark.

[*] Whitman: "A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim"