Poetry Feature:
'Only the Dead': Vietnam
Noon
Those who reflect in the glare of it . . .
| You've been to Vietnam and there's no horror in your voice. |
The skull appeared ancient, / But probably only months
Had passed since a brain / within this bone,
Worried about its safety.
-- Frank Cross ("The Skull Beside a Mountain Trail")
~ . ~ . ~
Jim Bodeen
Thinking about Buckshot Kneaded in the Plastic C-4 of the Brain
World News
For the Woman Who Wanted More But Would Not Love Us
The Marine on the Freeway
Letters from Vietnam
Alan Catlin
Kodachrome
Soylent Yellow
The Wasteland
W.D. Ehrhart
Song for Leela, Bobby and Me
Guerilla War
POW/MIA
Midnight at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Yusef Komunyakaa
Thanks
Please
Facing It
We Never Know
"You and I Are Disappearing"
Bruce Weigl
What Saves Us
Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry
Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag
~ . ~ . ~
Jim Bodeen
"Thinking about Buckshot Kneaded
in the Plastic C-4 of the Brain"--
--Yusef Komunyakaa
January 14, 1991
(for Roy Kokenge)
Just suppose, Doc,
this seizure, this apoplexy,
is the claymore I carried home
from Nam. A woman
who works with my wife
thinks the Congressional vote
this week will set off
explosions with guys like me
all over the country.
And whatever my troubles,
let's not blame them on stress.
Republicans, maybe.
Anyone who talks in sound bites.
But not stress. And not cigars.
I'd consider bad religion.
Fifteen years ago
I had to study Lutheran theology
with Catholics because local clergy
didn't think the man in the pew
was ready for truth.
I bring this up because
the pastor's coming by later today.
And what about medicine?
It took four doctors to find out
I was blind in one eye. By the way:
thanks. That's why I'm writing.
I'm home today for the first time
in twenty years. Listening to music.
I've been thinking
where to lay the rap.
Listing my sins.
I don't think it matters.
If I'm hard on myself,
and it was me, I'd blame sins
I wanted to commit, but didn't.
Suppose it's these war poems
I've been reading.
Komunyakaa writes at the Wall:
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
We're all veterans of that one.
Wednesday you're going to ask me
about seizures. We'll talk
about the little explosions
going off all around us.
World News
-- Then my soul froze.
Juan Rulfo
Everyone is dead.
All that is left are voices.
Voices everywhere
in Rulfo's spare prose.
Things have been bad for a long time.
And for a long time,
Rulfo, in Mexico,
has said nothing.
Now things are bad
in another part of the world.
There are voices
that won't go away.
They come into the living room,
through television,
bringing the past.
Echoes and voices.
A hospital ward full of NVA,
wrapped in bandages,
dripping blood. They have been
carpet bombed by B-52's.
I have never forgiven myself
for screaming.
Walter Cronkite tells
the reporter not to grandstand.
Things are bad. Worse
than Cronkite wants to hear.
Voices scare everybody.
Voices are the only hope we have.
For the Woman Who Wanted More
But Would Not Love Us
You've been to Vietnam and there's no horror in your voice.
-- The woman
Where were you in 1968?
The music is Mahler. The 3d Symphony.
Those are children singing.
They will die later in the song.
The soldier moved by love
does not deny his impulse to kill.
The Marine on the Freeway
-- for Gary Higgins
The marine is in traffic.
He rolls up his windows and screams,
Get out of my way. Get out of my fucking way.
The marine runs on curbs, takes secondary roads,
tailgates when he has to. The marine makes this run daily,
47 miles in traffic, from work to home.
Some days it takes 5 minutes,
some days it takes 10, the marine says,
before he finds his anger,
but it's everyday, he finds it. This is traffic.
Yesterday people didn't get out of his way.
The marine has a beer in his hand before breakfast.
He's talking with his friends. Like the old days.
The marine says a marine hit a kid with a rock
walking through the ville. He remembers the screams.
He says, I'm not the man who threw the rock.
The marine says, I kept my humanity.
The rock is where I drew the line.
I knew things were fucked. I knew I did not throw the rock.
The marine says, Vietnam was the best year of my life.
It's Veteran's Day, 1995
The marine came home from Nam in '68,
got loaded every day for eighteen years.
He says he doesn't know how to be honest.
In Vietnam he could put a pistol against the head
of the sleeping guard and chamber a round.
The marine says, Wake up soldier.
The marine says life was that simple.
The marine didn't need a union to get things done in Vietnam.
The marine looks out the window.
He sees the mountain. He sees the lake.
The marine is in traffic.
Don't talk to him about the lake.
Don't talk to him about the mountain.
This is not easy for the marine.
He knows what people say about nature.
It's not that simple.
The marine is in traffic.
Traffic is dangerous.
He is passing on the inside lane.
He's between work and home.
He did not throw the rock.
His windows are rolled up.
He's screaming.
He's telling people to get out of his way.
Letters from Vietnam
She loved me for the dangers..
.--Othello
for Karen on the eve of our 27th Anniversary
And for the intensity of our days.
For every story from the hospital.
For each picture of a child smiling.
Dahlias are love letters from a war zone.
Traded intimacy. Your first pearls.
Perfume from the east. An ao dai
cut to my memory of your skin,
leave room here, Mama Sanh for Karen's breasts.
Black silk pants and hand painted shoes
in metallic pinks the colors of exotic fingernails.
And domestic treasures: roses filling
Japanese dinnerware in circles of promise.
Love treasures and letters. Daily letters.
Pictures of me & Louie Santillo holding
the photo of you I still carry in my wallet.
Me and Louie eating provolone cheese from Jersey.
I put it all in the letters. Everything.
I gave you everything I had.
Everything I did, and wanted to do.
The number of people we put on planes,
the names of people who knew your name.
I held nothing back, nothing.
I dug it up, whatever I could find.
I put it down, and put it in the mail.
You loved me for these letters.
And I loved you for loving me.
Years before these dahlias,
years before you blossomed
and we disappeared with the flowers
in the garden, you married me
for these letters, these testaments
to promises, digging, hard-earned treasure.
~ . ~
Alan Catlin
Kodachrome
Maybe this Okie dude
had won some kind of
merit badge in photo
graphy, thought he
could get Oak Leaf
Clusters on his chest
along with a good
conduct medal & and A
for effort taking snaps
of the men standing
around base camp with
roll your owns hanging
from split lips like
the second coming of
James Dean, if he had
been brought back to
life as a grunt in
jungle fatigues, his
eyes hollowed out with
a bayonet & made a
crisscross bandolier,
the latest fashion
statement & made Rebel
Without a Cause
The National Anthem of
the Doomed -- all those
pictures taken, over
exposed, backs against
a high noon sun, an
entrenchment field of
battle bordered by
concertina wire & a mined
perimeter, time delayed
to go off as soon as
they were exposed.
Soylent Yellow
I was petrified,
some kind of carved
in stone soldier
of misfortune
too weak to lift
anything but a tumbler
full of Old Smugglers
Scotch with a History,
neat -- unable to sleep,
watching The Creature
Feature, a double header,
man at the end
of the food chain in
a world without pity
of his own making called
Soylent Green, and I
thought how Air Head
sd., back in the Nam,
that Sir Charles wasn't
human because you never
saw his dead, never saw
them eat, man, they were
like so skinny, they must
have been cooking their
dead, man, eating the flesh
and using the bones
for soup and I thought,
Yeah, man, you were right,
they do -- Soylent Yellow,
that's what they call it
now and it's coming to
a theater near you --
or maybe we just drink it,
like broth, I thought,
finishing off another fifth.
The Wasteland
In Dis I sang to them, they will remember me.
--Louise Glück, Orfeo
Would have looked
like the banks of
the Mekong after
a B-52 bombing run
if Eliot had been
a foot soldier
instead of a candy-
assed REMF -- that's
rear echelon mother
fucker to you -- or
a spontaneous DMZ
after a napalm bath
and wash that cured
what ailed you,
that made even
the biggest, dumbest
beasts of burden into
dried relic pieces
like some prehistoric
scuttling crab units
and we were the new men,
no longer hollow,
who got to watch
the show, so full of
what happened after,
not even our shit
would smell the same.
~ . ~
W.D. Ehrhart
Song for Leela, Bobby and Me
for Robert Ross
The day you flew to Tam Ky, I was green
with envy. Not that lifeless washed-out
green of sun-bleached dusty jungle utes.
I was rice shoot green, teenage green.
This wasn't going to be just one more
chickenscratch guerrilla fight:
farmers, women, boobytraps and snipers,
dead Marines, and not a Viet Cong in sight.
This was hardcore NVA,* a regiment at least.
But someone had to stay behind,
man the bunker, plot the H&I.
I have friends who wonder why I can't
just let the past lie where it lies,
why I'm still so angry.
As if there's something wrong with me.
As if the life you might have lived
were just a fiction, just a dream.
As if those California dawns
were just as promising without you.
As if the rest of us can get along
just as well without you.
Since you've been gone, they've taken boys
like you and me and killed them in Grenada,
Lebanon, the Persian Gulf, and Panama.
And yet I'm told I'm living in the past.
Maybe that's the trouble: we're a nation
with no sense of history, no sense at all.
I still have that photo of you
standing by the bunker door, smiling shyly,
rifle, helmet, cigarette, green uniform
you hadn’t been there long enough to fade
somewhere in an album I don't
have to look at any more. I already know
you just keep getting younger. In the middle
of this poem, my daughter woke up crying.
I lay down beside her, softly singing;
soon she drifted back to sleep.
But I kept singing anyway.
I wanted you to hear.
[*] NVA: North Vietnamese Army regulars, who,
unlike the better known, carbine rifle-carrying Vietcong,
were well-equipped, with boots and Russian AK-47's.
Guerilla War
It's practically impossible
to tell civilians
from the Vietcong.
Nobody wears uniforms.
They all talk
the same language.
(and you couldn't understand them
even if they didn't).
They tape grenades
inside their clothes,
and carry satchel charges
in their market baskets.
Even their women fight;
and young boys
and girls.
It's practically impossible
to tell civilians
from the Vietcong;
after a while,
you quit trying.
POW/MIA
I.
In the jungle of years,
lost voices are calling. Long
are the memories,
bitterly long the waiting,
and the names of the missing and dead
wander
disembodied
through a green tangle
of rumors and lies,
gliding like shadows among vines.
II.
Somewhere, so the rumors go,
men still live in jungle prisons.
Somewhere in Hanoi, the true believers
know,
the bodies of four hundred servicemen
lie on slabs of cold
communist hate.
III.
Mothers, fathers,
wives and lovers,
sons and daughters,
touch your empty fingers to your lips
and rejoice
in your sacrifice and pain:
your loved ones' cause
was noble,
says the state.
IV.
In March of 1985, the wreckage
of a plane was found in Laos.
Little remained of the dead:
rings, bone chips, burned
bits of leather and cloth;
for thirteen families,
twenty years of hope
and rumors
turned acid on the soul
by a single chance discovery.
V.
Our enemies are legion,
says the state;
let bugles blare
and bang the drum slowly,
bang the drum.
VI.
God forgive me, but I've seen
that triple-canopied green
nightmare of a jungle
where a man in a plane could go down
unseen, and never be found
by anyone.
Not ever.
There are facts,
and there are facts:
when the first missing man
walks alive out of that green tangle
of rumors and lies,
I shall lie
down silent as a jungle shadow,
and dream the sound of insects
gnawing bones.
Midnight at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Fifty-eight thousand American dead,
average age: nineteen years, six months.
Get a driver's license,
graduate from high school,
die.
All that's left of them
we've turned to stone.
What they never got to be
grows dimmer by the year.
But in the moon's dim light
when no one's here,
the names rise, step down
and start the long procession home
to what they left undone,
to what they loved, to anywhere
that's not this silent
wall of kids, this
smell of rotting dreams.
~ . ~
Yusef Komunyakaa
Thanks
Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper's bullet.
I don't know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dust.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman's wild colors,
causing some dark bird's love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer's gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I'm still
falling through its silence.
I don't know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.
Please
Forgive me, soldier.
Forgive my right hand
for pointing you
to the flawless
tree line now
outlined in my brain.
There was so much
bloodsky over our heads at daybreak
in Peiku, but I won't say
those infernal guns
blinded me on that hill.
Mistakes piled up men like clouds
pushed to the dark side.
Sometimes I try to retrace
them, running
my fingers down the map
telling less than a woman's body -
we followed the grid coordinates
in some battalion commander's mind.
If I could make my mouth
unsay those orders,
I'd holler: Don't
move a muscle.
Stay put,
& keep your fucking head
down, soldier.
Ambush.
Gutsmoke.
Last night
while making love
I cried out,
Hit the dirt!
I've tried to swallow my tongue.
You were a greenhorn, so fearless,
even foolish, & when I said go, Henry,
you went dancing on a red string
of bullets from that tree line
as it moved from a low cloud.
Facing It
My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way - the stone lets me go.
I turn that way - I'm inside
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
We Never Know
He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbled photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.
"You and I Are Disappearing"
-- Björn Håkansson
The cry I bring down from the hills
belongs to a girl still burning
inside my head. At daybreak
she burns like a piece of paper.
She burns like foxfire
in a thigh-shaped valley.
A skirt of flames
dances around her
at dusk.
We stand with our hands
hanging at our sides,
while she burns
like a sack of dry ice.
She burns like oil on water.
She burns like a cattail torch
dipped in gasoline.
She glows like the fat tip
of a banker's cigar,
silent as quicksilver.
A tiger under a rainbow
at nightfall.
She burns like a shot glass of vodka.
She burns like a field of poppies
at the edge of a rain forest.
She rises like dragonsmoke
to my nostrils.
She burns like a burning bush
driven by a godawful wind.
~ . ~
Bruce Weigl
What Saves Us
We are wrapped around each other
in the back of my father's car parked
in the empty lot of the high school
of our failures, sweat on her neck
like oil. The next morning I would leave
for the war and I thought I had something
coming for that, I thought to myself
that I would not die never having
been inside her body. I lifted
her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
blown inside out by the storm. I pulled
her cotton panties up as high
as she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
was in sight. We were drowning
on our tongues and I tried
to tear my pants off when she stopped
so suddenly we were surrounded
only by my shuddering
and by the school bells
grinding in the empty halls.
She reached to find something,
a silver crucifix on a silver chain,
the tiny savior's head
hanging, and stakes through his hands and feet.
She put it around my neck and held me
so long my heart's black wings were calmed.
We are not always right
about what we think will save us.
I thought that dragging the angel down that night
would save me, but I carried the crucifix in my pocket
and rubbed it on my face and lips
nights the rockets roared in.
People die sometimes so near you,
you feel them struggling to cross over,
the deep untangling, of one body from another.
Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry
All this time I had forgotten.
My miserable platoon was moving out
One day in the war and I had my clothes in the laundry.
I ran the two dirt miles,
Convoy already forming behind me. I hit
The block of small hooches and saw her
Twist out the black rope of her hair in the sun.
She did not look up at me,
Not even when I called to her for my clothes.
She said I couldn't have them,
They were wet . . .
Who would've thought the world stops
Turning in the war, the tropical heat like hate
And your platoon moves out without you,
Your wet clothes piled
At the feet of the girl at the laundry,
Beautiful with her facts.
Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag
Because this evening Miss Hoang Yen
sat down with me in the small
tiled room of her family house
I am unable to sleep.
We shared a glass of cold and sweet water,
On a blue plate her mother brought us
cake and smiled her betel black teeth at me
but I did not feel strange in the house
my country had tried to bomb into dust.
In English thick and dazed as blood
she told me how she watched our planes
cross her childhood's sky,
all the children of Hanoi
carried in darkness to mountain hamlets, Nixon's
Christmas bombing. She let me hold her hand,
her shy unmoving fingers, and told me
how afraid she was those days and how this fear
had dug inside her like a worm and lives
inside her still, won't die or go away.
And because she's stronger, she comforted me,
said I'm not to blame,
the million sorrows alive in her gaze.
With the dead we share no common rooms.
With the frightened we can't think straight;
no words can bring the burning city back.
Outside on Hung Dao Street
I tried to say goodbye and held her hand
too long so she looked back through traffic
towards her house and with her eyes
she told me I should leave.
All night I ached for her and for myself
and nothing I could think or pray
would make it stop. Some birds sang morning
home across the lake. In small reed boats
the lotus gatherers sailed out
among their resuming white blossoms.
Hanoi, 1990
~ . ~ . ~
Permissions:
[See Contributors Notes for biographies of these distinguished poets. Eds.]
Bodeen: All poems reprinted with the author's permission from Impulse to Love (Blue Begonia Press, 1998).
Catlin: All poems provided by the author.
Ehrhart: All poems reprinted with the author's permission. "Song for Leela, Bobby and Me" provided by WDE. "Guerilla War" is from Unaccustomed Mercy: Soldier Poets of the Vietnam War, Ehrhart, W.D., ed. (Texas Tech University Press, 1989); "POW/MIA" from his Just for Laughs (Vietnam Generation Inc. & Burning Cities Press, 1990); "Midnight at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial" from The Distance We Travel (Adastra Press, 1993). Those three poems also appear in the anthology, From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (Phillip Mahony, ed., Scribner Poetry, 1998).
Komunyakaa: All poems reprinted with the author's permission. All poems except "Please" from Dien Cai Dau (Wesleyan University Press, 1988); "Please" from Toys in a Field (Black River Press, 1986). "We Never Know" and "You and I Are Disappearing" also appear in the anthology, From Both Sides Now: The Poetry of the Vietnam War and Its Aftermath (Phillip Mahony, ed., Scribner Poetry, 1998).
Weigl: All poems reprinted with the author's permission. "What Saves Us" and "Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag" from What Saves Us (Triquarterly Books, 1992); "Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry" from The Monkey Wars (University of Georgia Press, 1985). Those three poems also appear in From Both Sides Now (see, supra).
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