Some boys fell before me in heaps, their arms
and legs flaily ridiculously through the smoke
and flash. I remember that. I remember
the smell of the Vietnamese woman's hair
on the crowded train as we slowed for the last curve
before home. I remember a necklace of human ears,
everything, in sunlight, I can't stop seeing.
The preeminent poet of the Vietnam War—the American War as the Vietnamese call it—Bruce Weigl is the author of more than thirty books of poetry and prose, most recently, Among Elms in Ambush (BOA, 2019) and On the Shores of Welcome Home (BOA, 2021). He is also the translator or co-translator of several books of poetry from the Vietnamese, including The Beginning of Water by Tran Le Khanh, winner of the Cliff Becker Book Prize in Translation. His collection, The Abundance of Nothing was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. His newest poetry collection, forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd, in 2025, is Apostle of Desire. Although a poet of war, Weigl writes beyond war into all that makes us human—affairs of the heart and of lust, the connections we make and lose, the song sounding within us day-to-day.
“Weigl bears true witness to the reality of war, and his work takes its place alongside the strongest war poetry of this century.”—The Hudson Review
“Reading these poems I am struck with something close to awe for the resilience of the human body and the human heart. I can only compare Song of Napalm with the remarkable poetry of Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. I cherish Bruce Weigl’s poetry as a great gift.”—Larry Heinemann
The poems that follow are selected from nine collections and conclude with a group of new poems from 2023:
from A Romance
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979)
A Romance
The skinny red-haired girl gets up
from the bar and dances
over to the juke box
and punches the buttons as if
she were playing the piano—
below the white points of her pelvis
an enormous belt buckle
shaped like the head of a snake
with two red rhinestone eyes
which she polishes with the heels of her hands
making circles on her own fine thighs
and looking up
she catches me staring, my lust like a flag
waving at her across the room
as her big mean boy-friend
runs hillbilly after hillbilly off the table
in paycheck nine-ball games.
It is always like this with me in bars,
wanting women I know
I’ll have to get my face punched bloody to love.
Or she could be alone,
and I could be dull enough from liquor
to imagine my face interesting enough to take her
into conversation while I count my money
hoping to Jesus I have enough
to get us both romantic.
I don’t sleep anyway so I go to bars
and tell my giant lies to women
who have heard them from me,
from the thousands of me
out on the town with our impossible strategies
for no good reason but ourselves, who are holy.
Monkey
Out of the horror there rises a musical ache that is beautiful.
—James Wright
1
I am you are he she it is they are you are we are.
I am you are he she it is they are you are we are.
When they ask for your number pretend to be breathing.
Forget the stinking jungle,
force your fingers between the lines.
Learn to get out of the dew.
The snakes are thirsty.
Bladders, water, boil it, drink it.
Get out of your clothes:
you can’t move in your green clothes.
Your O.D. in color issue.
Get out the plates and those who ate, those who spent the night.
Those small Vietnamese soldiers.
They love to hold your hand.
Back away from their dark cheeks.
Small Vietnamese soldiers.
They love to love you.
I have no idea how it happened, I remember nothing but light.
2
I don’t remember the hard swallow of the lover.
I don't remember the burial of ears.
I don’t remember
the time of the explosion.
This is the place curses are manufactured: delivered like white tablets.
The survivor is spilling his bedpan.
He slips a curse into your pocket, you’re finally satisfied.
I don’t remember the heat in the hands,
the heat around the neck.
Good times bad times sleep get up work. Sleep get up good times bad times.
Work eat sleep good bad work times.
I like a certain cartoon of wounds.
The water which refused to dry.
I like a little unaccustomed mercy.
Pulling the trigger is all we have.
I hear a child.
3
I dropped to the bottom of a well.
I have a knife.
I cut someone with it.
Oh, I have the petrified eyebrows
of my Vietnam monkey.
My monkey from Vietnam.
My monkey.
Put your hand here.
It makes no sense.
I beat the monkey.
I didn't know him.
He was bloody.
He lowered his intestines
to my shoes. My shoes
spit-shined the moment
I learned to tie the bow.
I’m not on speaking terms
with anyone. In the wrong climate
a person can spoil,
the way a pair of boots slows you down.
I don’t know when I’m sleeping.
I don’t know if what I’m saying
is anything at all.
I’ll lie on my monkey bones.
4
I’m tired of the rice
falling in slow motion
like eggs from the smallest animal.
I’m twenty-five years old,
quiet, tired of the same mistakes,
the same greed, the same past.
The same past with its bleat
and pound of the dead,
with its hand grenade
tossed into a hootch on a dull Sunday
because when a man dies like that
his eyes sparkle,
his nose fills with witless nuance
because a farmer in Bong Son
has dead cows lolling
in a field of claymores
because the VC tie hooks to their comrades
because a spot of blood
is a number
because a woman is lifting
her dress across the big pond.
If we’re soldiers we should smoke them
if we have them. Someone’s bound
to point us in the right direction
sooner or later.
I’m tired and I’m glad you asked.
5
There is a hill.
Men run top hill.
Men take hill.
Give hill to man.
Me and my monkey
and me and my monkey
my Vietnamese monkey
my little brown monkey
came with me to Guam and Hawaii
in Ohio he saw
my people he
jumped on my daddy
he slipped into mother
he baptized my sister
he’s my little brown monkey
he came here from heaven
to give me his spirit
imagine my monkey
my beautiful monkey
he saved me lifted me
above the punji sticks
above the mines
above the ground burning
above the dead above
the living above the
wounded dying the wounded
dying.
6
Me and my monkey
and me and my monkey
my Vietnamese monkey
my little brown monkey
came with me to Guam and Hawaii
in Ohio he saw
my people he
jumped on my daddy
he slipped into mother
he baptized my sister
he's my little brown monkey
he came here from heaven
to give me his spirit
imagine my monkey
my beautiful monkey
he saved me lifted me
above the punji sticks
above the mines
above the ground burning
above the dead above
the living above the
wounded dying the wounded
dying.
7
Men take hill away from smaller men.
Men take hill and give to fatter man.
Men take hill. Hill has number.
Men run up hill. Run down.
from The Monkey Wars
(University of Georgia Press, 1985)
Amnesia
If there was a world more disturbing than this
Where black clouds bowed down and swallowed you whole
And overgrown tropical plants
Rotted, effervescent in the muggy twilight and monkeys
Screamed something
That came to sound like words to each other
Across the triple-canopy jungle you shared,
You don’t remember it.
You tell yourself no and cry a thousand days.
You imagine the crows calling autumn into place
Are your brothers and you could
If only the strength and will were there
Fly up to them to be black And useful to the wind.
1955
After mass father rinsed the chalice with wine
Again and again.
Drunk before noon
He’d sleep it off in the sacristy
While the other altar boys and I
Rummaged through the sacred things, feeling up
The blessed linen and silk vestments,
Swinging the censer above us so it whistled.
We put our hands on everything we could reach
Then woke the father for mass.
In summer the wool cassock itched
And I sweated through the white lace surplice.
My head reeled from incense
So I mumbled through the Latin prayers
And learned to balance the paten
Gracefully under their chins, my face
Turned away from the priest
Who dipped into the cup
As if to pluck a fish
And just like that something took me by the brain
And I saw myself
Torn loose from the congregation,
Floating like an impossible
Balloon of myself and I thought
This must be what my life is
Though I didn’t know what it meant
And I couldn’t move or swallow and thought I’d panic
Until father scowled and nudged me down the altar railing
To the next mouth
Open in the O of acceptance
So much like a scream
That can’t get out of the lungs.
I don’t know why my hands should shake,
I’m only remembering something.
Homage to Elvis, Homage to the Fathers
All night the pimps’ cars slide past the burning mill
Where I’ve come back
To breathe the slag stink air of home.
Without words the gray workers trade shifts,
The serious drinkers fill the bar
To dull the steel ringing their brains.
As I remember, as I want it to be,
The Buicks are pastel, pale
In the light burning out of the city’s dirty side
Where we lived out our life
Sentences in a company house,
Good people to love and fight,
matters of the lucky heart that doesn't stop.
Beyond the mill street
Slag heaps loom up like dunes, almost beautiful.
Once we played our war games there
And a boy from the block ran screaming
He’s here, it’s him at the record store
And we slid down the sooty waste of the mill
And black and grimy we stood outside
Behind our screaming older sisters
And saw him, his hair puffed up and shiny, his gold
Bracelets catching light.
He changed us somehow: we cleaned up,
We spun the 45s in the basement,
Danced on the cool concrete and plastered
Our hair back like his and twisted
Our forbidden hips.
Across the alley our fathers died
Piece by piece among the blast furnace rumble.
They breathed the steel rifted air
As if it were good.
Unwelcome, I stand outside the mill gates,
Watch workers pass as ghosts.
close my eyes and it all makes sense.
I believe I will live forever.
believe the world will rip apart
From the inside
Of our next moment alive.
from Song of Napalm
(The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1988)
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.
Some Thoughts On The Ambassador: Bong Son, 1967
Bunker the ambassador.
Does Mr. Bunker have a bunker?
He must have a bunker with chrome faucets and a sauna
and a mama-san to ease his mind.
They must call it
Mr. Bunker’s bunker.
He must be shaking his head.
The Kiss
All the good-byes said and done
I climbed into the plane and sat down.
From the cold I was shaking and ached
to be away from the love
of those waving through the frozen window.
(Once as a boy I was lost in a storm,
funnel cloud twisting so near
I was pitched from my bicycle
into the ditch.
picked up by the wind and yellow sky,
my arms before me
feeling my way through the wind
I could not cry above.
Out of that black air of debris,
out of nowhere, my father bent down,
lifted me and ran to the house of strangers.)
And again that day on the plane
he appeared to me,
my forgotten orders in his hands.
He bent down to put the envelope into my lap,
on my lips he kissed me hard
and without a word he was gone
into the cold again.
Through the jungle, through the highlands,
through all that green dying
I touched my fingers to my lips.
Elegy
Into sunlight they marched,
into dog day, into no saints day,
and were cut down.
They marched without knowing
how the air would be sucked from their lungs,
how their lungs would collapse,
how the world would twist itself, would
bend into the cruel angles.
Into the black understanding they marched
until the angels came
calling their names,
until they rose, one by one from the blood.
The light blasted down on them.
The bullets sliced through the razor grass
so there was not even time to speak.
The words would not let themselves be spoken.
Some of them died.
Some of them were not allowed to.
from After the Others
(TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press)
After the Others
everything changed.
They took the mountains
then crossed the river
swiftly in their long boats.
Always they have come.
They took the trees.
They took the brown earth
and the small houses.
They silenced the voices
and took the words
so no one could tell the story
of the time before
because they have always come,
because there is no time before.
Under a single blue cloud
a man and a woman touched each other.
An unfaithful gratuity of dogs appeared.
The old people stopped speaking.
They would not bear witness
to the visitations
or to the jangled, rising noise of gabble
conjured in place of a history. God
was invented
so they could bear their suffering.
In the end
they had only each other
and wandering, alone,
that was not enough.
Errata
In the olive groves Jesus had lingered
so long after Mary had come
to fetch him to heal her feverish brother
that Lazarus, believing,
died in the tearing garden sun.
Never mind that Lazarus
did not want to return;
the impatient, irresistible Christ
raised him to his feet
as if by a chord of nervous light,
and left him standing there, amazed
in his death stench, beheld. And later,
grieving, he could not drink
or make praise with the others,
rejoicing. He did not know how to be.
He waited for a sign
that he knew would never come
until beyond the hubbub,
he disappeared through a seam
where even the Christ could not go.
The Choosing of Mozart’s Fantasie Over Suicide
The great music I watched
finds its way
through a broken boy’s world
of walls and walls.
I swear to Christ
I never knew for sure if this could be. We say,
We tried it all but nothing works,
not even when you give
your heart held out in open hands. We say,
we almost lost him once or twice,
yet never did we cleave that way before.
And he cleaved too.
He loved the music deep somewhere inside himself
and found the peaceful thing
the sometimes-mad man left behind
between the ache of melody
and melody undone, and brave
he let himself come back to us
and never mind that other boy
he’d thought he had to be.
from What Saves Us
(TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 1992)
Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag
Because this evening Miss Hong 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)
Breakdown
With sleep that is barely under the surface
it begins, a twisting sleep as if a wire
were inside you and tried at night
to straighten your body.
Or it's like a twitch
through the nerves as you sleep
so you tear the sheets from the bed
to try and stop the spine from pounding.
A lousy worthless
sleep of strangers with guns,
children trapped in an alley,
teenage soldiers glancing back
over their shoulders
the moment before
they squeeze the trigger.
I am going to stay here as long as I can.
I am going to sit in this garden as if nothing has happened
and let these bruised azaleas have their way.
The Impossible
Winter’s last rain and a light I don’t recognize
through the trees and I come back in my mind
to the man who made me suck his cock
when I was seven, in sunlight, between boxcars.
I thought I could leave him standing there
in the years, half smile on his lips,
small hands curled into small fists,
but after he finished, he held my hand in his
as if astonished, until the houses were visible
just beyond the railyard. He held my hand
but before that he slapped me hard on the face
when I would not open my mouth for him.
I do not want to say his whole hips
slammed into me, but they did, and a black wave
washed over my brain, changing me
so I could not move among my people in the old way.
On my way home I stopped in the churchyard
to try and find a way to stay alive.
In the branches a redwing flitted, warning me.
In the rectory, Father prepared
the body and blood for mass
but God could not save me from a mouthful of cum.
That afternoon some lives turned away from the light.
He taught me how to move my tongue around.
In his hands he held my head like a lover.
Say it clearly and you make it beautiful, no matter what.
In the Autumn Village
Half in the street and half
up on the sidewalk
in the Village off of Eighth
a man in the Saturday cold air
without shoes
tried to crawl across the street
through busy traffic.
I’m no better than you,
but you’ve got to help a man
who’s trying to go someplace
on his hands and knees.
I don't know what it means to crawl,
or where you would go,
or in whose empty arms you could believe,
but I put my books down to help.
I offered my arm
as if to a girl
stepping from her father’s porch
into an evening.
I thought he would pull himself
up on my arm and walk away from us.
I was afraid, and bent over him
as if he might leap out at me.
I’m no goddamn better than you
but he couldn’t move another inch
so I put my arms around him
and lifted him to the sidewalk.
The wind made some trees talk.
The city noise returned upon us,
a wave I could ride out on and away.
from Sweet Lorain
(TriQuarterly Books, Northwestern University Press, 1996)
From the House on Nguyen Du
One pile of squid
stretched on small bamboo kites
drying in the sun
One driver asleep near his cyclo
in the shade of banyans
by the lake of the returned sword
One wild dog
chasing rats into the sewer
his head like a fox
His tail like the rat’s
he does not speak my tongue
my smell is foreign to him
One pile of gladiolus
pink and white
in the cyclo’s empty seat
Waiting to be taken to the lover
who tends her misery
in the city’s ancient heart
One street of paper shoes
and votive paper
clothes for the dead
One ball of fire
hurling itself into my face
in the first dream in-country
One long fever that took me
so far up heaven’s ladder
I was surrounded
By two men, and a boy
lovely as the Buddha
in failing light
One set of needles
twisted and tapped
into the meridian
Of nerves in my back and arms
one set of joss sticks
white hot as charcoal
Held by the men and the boy
to the bridges of my blood
until my heart is warmed
One scream
when the nerve of sickness
is finally tapped
One hour of sweat and delusion
until the small reed boat
piled with lotus blossoms
Sails a wide circle
out and away
that signifies the world
Carp
We fished for carp whose flesh would never find
our lips, the bottom feeders fathers said to kill.
We fished at night with bloody bait designed
to draw them up from river mud. Our will
was to possess a life not ours, to make
those glowing spirit bodies understand
our need for blood spilled simply for the sake
of what we thought it took to be a man.
I’ll never understand that rage we knew,
that knife that someone gouged into the eyes
of carp we caught but didn’t think to do
the killing right, and wasted lives despised
for reasons lost now in the blur of days.
Not boys, but something darker, something crazed.
Three Fish
Duc Thanh brought me three fish
he had caught in the small lake on Nguyen Du.
They were the color of pearls;
they were delicate and thin. Already
winter was in the wind from China,
voices of ancestors on swan’s wings.
This late in the season,
evening traffic’s hum and weave beginning to rise
beyond the guardians of the gate,
these fish are a great gift.
I was in my room,
lost in a foreign silence.
I wanted to eat the miles up somehow,
I wanted to split my soul in two
so I could stay forever
in the musty guest house pleasures.
I was that far away, that lost
when he called to me, ghost that he is,
across the courtyard, and in moonlight,
held up three silver fish.
from On the Shores of Welcome Home
(BOA Editions, 2019)
Against Forgetting (Two)
I didn’t remember where to start my life.
If you could translate the screams of brain cells
under duress
it would be deafening,
like a waterfall of nails down the blackboard.
I thought of this in the fourth grade.
I figured out that words meant exactly what they said,
and at the same time
meant nothing at all. School
was downhill for me from then on.
Fragments in Translation from the Vietnamese:
The presence of natives is beneficial
to our overall splendor,
whenever that happens.
Someone is waiting under a dim light in a dark room;
he is not difficult to reach,
or as far away as he seems.
Do not touch the teacher.
Leave the temple fragments alone.
Make a Buddha with three stones.
You will look through an alleyway
that appears in the jungle
and seems to go on and on,
your glass shoes slipping
as you try to keep up.
Yet who wants to remember all of the dead
is important
to the dead.
You think you feel the world
inside of you,
a soaking rain on the bamboo roof
that mimics the sound of loss.
The Long-Term Consequences of the Convoy Leading to Pegasus in the Fallen World
Or when I packed myself up for the loony bin
I didn’t know it was the loony bin at the time
was my lousy problem and I blame myself
for that and I ended up in a field I know
is littered with mines because I’ve seen it before
beside a river named Ca Lu if my brain allows
me just one memory one sane moment like the one
the photon bright flashes the doctors held inches from
my face brought back a radiant time that no one in
the room could know but me like the field of mines
I had stood next to on the LZ, and walked around
more than once and watched a parachute of something
drift off target and land there almost softly the lights
the doctors flashed in my eyes and the saline they pumped
into my veins and the thirty hours without sleep
brought that morning right back into the room and that
morning became the day of the longest night of
the seven dead in a single bunker from artillery
fired across an invisible line in the dark night of small
arms fire along the river and movement in the
high grass voices radio noise sometimes even their music
night of the separation of my soul from my body
such a violent tearing I couldn’t even feel.
Crazy with His Anguish and Dumb with Grief
The air above the moving water.
The air above the moving water.
Cool spring air above the moving water.
The river comes from where it goes.
Stand in the deeply moving river long enough
and you can feel what time is, and what time is not.
You can be jolted from one way of seeing
into a wholly other way of strangers crossing over
who don’t belong among us,
a conspiracy of the dead you could call them.
You could call them a shroud that moves through the room
like a tiny black cloud and then disappears,
although stranger things have happened.
The air above the moving water is
cool in spring. I believe in a paradise of words,
like the words you find under great rocks in the river,
and the words high in the branches on night wind,
and the words that tell a secret kept for so long
it can never be forgiven. I believe
in the leaves turning up, before the storm
is even in our sight. In a vacuum
there is no sorrow or longing. Everything
they taught us was about living, with nothing
about how to die. The air above
the moving water is cool in the spring.
The wheel turns, and you’re back again
to the same place. The less time you have,
the more beautiful everything in the world appears.
from The Abundance of Nothing
(Triquarterly, 2012)
Tale of the Tortoise
I don’t know how the tortoise got in through the fence and past the neighborhood dogs that run loose once the sun is down, but I found her near a nest of her eggs where the garden had already begun to turn to autumn. It seemed she’d found a home there, and who was I to tell her otherwise, so I brought her straw to make a better bed, and food I never saw her eat but that disappeared from the tin plate where I put it. I don’t remember now how long it took, but she kept the eggs warm until they hatched, and her many babies scrambled out in every direction until she rounded them up again into her care. Now I have to tell you that there never was a tortoise, only one that I wanted to be there. There never was a fence to crawl under, or neighborhood dogs for someone to step around down the dark alley. There was no dark alley. There was no nest or eggs, no straw, no hope for anything. But I did find a tortoise in my yard one morning where it had laid its eggs in a nest it had made with mowed grass. I don’t know where she came from but perhaps she was a neighbor’s pet, and there was a zoo nearby. I called the police to see if they knew what to do, and they came quickly, and confirmed that it was a tortoise, with eggs. Sometimes you need to tell a story to fill a hole in your mind, or to try and mend something that’s been torn by a violent wave that washed through you once. There was no tortoise, and no policeman. I know, I have to stop doing this. I want you to believe me. It’s all about the story. It’s all we have.
This Back-Porch Rocker My Prison
As if the sun was going down one last time, we are killing ourselves with desperate pleasure so primitive, the brain will not let go once it has a taste, once it has a chance to warm up a vein, then an arm, then a whole way of being, which is a way of not being in the world. I wonder where the love was when we needed it. I heard the lark sing out across the green expanse of time, and then I heard that song come back as if it didn’t matter to the night, no souls out there to call us in return, only ourselves to hold the wall against such need as you have never seen or felt before. Leave the door open, turn the lights on and hold the child tight against you. Hold the child tight, and against you.
Black Swans in the Garden of Perfect Splendor
Built by the emperors of the Qing Dynasty as their summer resort, Yuanmingyuan Park fell into disarray, and in 1860, Anglo-French troops sacked it and burned it to the ground. After the birth of the People’s Republic, the damaged gardens were restored by local farmers. It is so beautiful and considered so important, it’s now the place of the Lotus Flower Festival. I’m stalling because the black swans are too beautiful for me to even remember, and because there is no beauty like the black swans that words could ever say. Just to think them brings their beauty back to me like a coronary shock, and I think they are the saddest things I have ever seen in this poor world, and I believe they must have come from somewhere else, black angels who descended from the clouds beyond our knowing and are now among us in such a perfection of beauty that you can hardly breathe when you see them on the lake, with their young, just at dusk, against the sun going down. Except when they lift their wings to expose the only white they carry, they are impossible to see in the dark.
for Xia Lu
The Still Unravished Bryn of Quietude
I knew a woman once named Bryn who lived in a trailer, although it wasn’t in a park, but in the city, near the steel mill behind some abandoned buildings. The rent was cheap, and it came that she invited me to stay there with her awhile. We were poor and didn’t have a car or much else except what the G.I. Bill could buy in nineteen seventy something, and with her tips from the rowdy bar where she said she’d found her peace. I was in college. It was just after the war. I think she was lonely like me, especially at night, when she came home late from the bar where she waitressed until two or three. I would sleep late and then get up and walk home with her the five or six blocks through nothing good, night after night, and when we arrived, she would empty her apron of her tips from the long day, with which also comes humiliation, and she would give the money to me as if she was presenting me with a sword, or with some kind of award, and she would smile when I refused and tried to push the money back. Some people have the kind of smile that can look back through thousands of years so that when their light falls on you, you can feel them through your whole body like the shiver that joy is. I needed the light of that smile, and the feel of her body against mine at night when she fell asleep in my arms.
Like her, I needed the unnameable force that love is, and we had found something like that one night, dancing drunk in a drunken bar, until we danced all the way to her trailer, and spent more than a few nights there in her bed, listening to the AM. radio and sometimes singing along. This is what a lite can be. But later, I would get busy at school, stay in the dorms and not see her for a while, a week or so, and once, one of her friends called, frightened, and told me that Bryn needed me.
A pal drove me there and dropped me off. I thought she’d be a work, but liked to listen to the A.M. radio in the trailer, and to wait for Motown to come on, and for her to come home, but when I got there, I found several people milling around the small front porch of the trailer, whose door was open even in the cold, and more people out in the street nearby. I walked through the open door and saw her lying there, on the couch that someone had covered with starched, white sheets. She was pale and her face was swollen and bloody. She was being tended to by local nurses the neighbors had called after she made her way home from where she’d been taken by three strange men in a car. They had robbed her on her way home from work. They tore off her apron full of tip money. It was the middle of winter, in Ohio. They made her take her clothes off in the car and beat her with a pistol when she was too slow, then they dumped her in a snowy field near the pipe mill. Naked, she made her way home through the still-dark morning and the unbearable cold, alone, and once outside her own door, she began to scream, and didn’t stop, the neighbors said, until police arrived. You can be alive after something like that; you can work and dance and sing and maybe even fall in love after something like that, but it would never be okay. I saw her only once more, a few years later at a flea market in the country where she let me hold her hand while we talked, but she never let her eyes find my eyes again, although I wanted her to see how I had taken on the grief, and that if only I had been there for her, it never would have happened. But when she pulled her hand away, it was as if a curtain came down between us, and I knew it was the end of something that had haunted me, that had teased me out of thought more than a few times, like a nightmare whose ending you can't remember, and so have to keep having again and again. I don’t care what you say about love; one heart is always lonely for another heart, until it finds the one that soothes the beating, that erases the sound of bullets, exploding all around you.
from Apostle of Desire
(forthcoming from BOA Editions, Ltd., 2025)
The Dangers of Searching the Photographs
of Reynaldo Sandoval
for my friend, RS
I’d thought about death, watching her sleep that day,
although I knew it wasn’t sleep that the dead
practice, but something like sleep. A rock
bridge collapses to make a chasm too wide
to cross safely. A man is holding another man’s
head by reaching in through the bars of a cage
hung from the ornate ceiling by a chain. Somewhere
the sky at dusk is filled with birds. Somewhere
a woman’s face is gullied by the rivers
of her years, her beauty finding
refuge in her dark eyes. If we were
generous by nature, there would be enough for everyone,
but we’re not, and whose fucking plan was that I wonder.
I saw an elephant carved into the sheer face
of a cliff by ancient hands and I could only
weep. Deserts stretched out before me, my tender
escape. Kissing, the man and the woman
melt into each other’s faces. There were some
words of Lorca, some cities, drowned in their own light.
Being and Listening
What the night bird doesn’t know
can hurt her. Any bird
who lives in the dark
should be watched closely
for signs of any diminishment
of interest in the State
and in what the State says is the truth.
Nightbird in the black sky,
what is love?
Can it be a simple promise between hearts,
the names of longing
written across the sheer face of cliffs
impossible to climb.
Saying Goodbye to Achill
for John Deane
At a certain age
goodbye begins to mean
something.
One fine poet friend
warned me against writing about the sheep,
and although I understood what he meant,
I also knew that the black-faced
scraggly ewes
with their lambs in the grassy bogs
would find their way into my dreams,
and what else could I do
but let them have their way
one cold windy Cauban day
when they’d stood in a circle
around a single fallen sister,
the gimp we’d watched get worse
finally taking her down.
Determined to keep out
whatever tried to get in,
they stayed that way all morning.
I had business at the pub.
I left her lying there, soundlessly
among her brethren,
and when I returned,
part of the landscape
had fallen off into the sea.
Dark Barges Churn the River White in the Moon
1
Phosphorescent particles of life
rise to city lights
held by the water’s surface
just long enough for memory. Saigon
river, how did I find my way,
eighteen years old
plus nine months of jungle,
I couldn’t believe my luck
to sleep in a dorm-like barrack
and have regular chow, three meals, every day.
I couldn’t believe we were free,
to wander through the city as we pleased,
and the wild spirit I’d brought with me to war
took that invitation like a promise of everything
I couldn’t allow to go unlived.
More than fifty years since that singular night,
nearly twenty thousand moons,
but what difference does time make
when the soul is at stake.
When the river is at stake,
what difference does the blue air make
to those swept away.
2
Whatever happened we have been made to remember,
over and over, modern
psychiatric medicine and therapy saw to that, line
up for your benefits as if a monthly dole could give you
back what was taken away, but in its place
a certain rawness came inside,
living on the torn edge of things
your only chance.
And whatever flowers were present are forgiven
their unrequited beauty. Only
truth will set you free, only
observing your actions
closely enough to see the cracks
and make your own sad song from what’s left.
3
No value in the telling, I must show,
the words a wall of reeds
the light slides through like water,
the words as unreliable as a next breath.
I didn’t understand what they wanted,
although I pretended that I did. Money
was involved,
and all I had to do was lead a fellow-
soldier to a room where a girl I didn’t know
and had never seen, waited. Not knowing
is not a reason for forgiveness. I should have known.
I found a kid in the bar downstairs, already drunk, and
whispered into his ear and led him to that upstairs room.
Once he went inside,
but before they’d closed the door,
I saw through the opening
the naked body of a child on the bed. American
music playing on someone’s radio.
I only had a glimpse
before they closed the door
but I spoke out anyway. I asked about her age.
I raised my voice in Vietnamese
and said it wasn’t good,
and pointed to the now closed door.
The man in charge resisted, and soon,
two more men showed up and gently,
with strength I could feel as they held me,
led me away down the stairs.
Out on the street the man handed me the money.
I didn’t need it, or want it, but I took it anyway.
4
Some days come easy as blossoms in spring,
their slow indulgence of the world
a lesson in how to live. Some days
haunt like a shroud you can’t throw off,
and your only chance is to choose a path
through the dark trees of memory
and hope for an escape. Isn’t that all we want,
and doesn’t the wheel that time is
return with the same impossible
spinning of what was taken away and what was given back.
5
The return of inevitable stars
provides comfort to an aching body, even this late.
Stylish night overtakes us
until the poorer quarters
are blurred at the edges,
and impossible to see any longer. Jazz music
seeps from the open window
of an upstairs club on the river,
the silent barges
slipping past like all of memory.
A saxophone blows Coltrane, sweet,
More lasting than bronze,
the notes like words that say,
I am what you were,
and now you are known.
Night Message, from a Friend
I was cold
because I had carried the warmth of your life in my body. You left me here.
But the sky was not so vast I had to close my eyes,
and the defeat not so accurate
so as to leave me with nothing.
The night’s scarred face is something.
New Poems 2023—present
December Revolution
Beijing winter so cold
our frozen breath hangs
in the air. I wanted to hold
your hand and walk with you
without a care, as if
our lives had finally come
to be. The streets are filled
with shoppers in a rush,
so you negotiate
ahead of me; it’s not
so much a question of
your trust in me to make
my way, but more your care,
your easy way through crowds
like this, as if we were
a pair, yet in your coming
home there is a rift,
a wide expanse of dark
that I don’t understand.
No need to say the weight
of separation, the miles
away from even the smallest touch,
an arm on your shoulder as the sun goes down,
your lips against my ear with a secret
no one else could know,
a bond between two spirits.
I go for refuge to that source.
Elegy for a Young Captain
When I’m ashamed of deeds
that haunt me still, especially
at night, when there’s no peace,
the only thing that I
can do is kill the images
that won’t release me from
the muggy jungle memories
of blood; that one boy’s face
that I cannot let go,
his body torn to shreds.
I understood the trouble
we were in, how death
can glow inside a body
just before it’s time.
I watched him fall away.
I didn’t know the end
of things could be so near.
Some Words for a Dead Poet Friend
for FW
We would laugh and joke about how bad the elegies
were that we were forced to read in British Lit.,
and we’d mock-read them out loud, using a fractured English accent,
so I wouldn’t dare an elegy here,
although I did want to remember you,
and the sweet way you lost your mind those days
when only poetry mattered to us, kindness in your face
unfazed by the emptiness that ate inside of you.
What harm was done to us we did to each other,
and to ourselves, battling
like brothers, over poems, teachers, the attention of women,
not to mention the meaning of everything. We didn’t know
or didn’t want to know
that we should nurture, not tear away,
however clever our digs and our declarations.
There was a time, one autumn, in a dying apple orchard,
when we came together, and split apart,
at exactly the same moment. Remember?
Ode to Autumn
The squirrels are busy.
That they remember where they’d buried
their store of acorns and nuts
is a myth, created to make us all feel better,
that’s why they have to work so hard,
all fucking day, searching.
Leaves cover the gardens.
Not a blanket, exactly,
but more another layer of meaning
as the sun begins to turn away from us,
before the days shorten to almost nothing,
the nights so long your only hope
to surrender to spirts who come down
from their high branches
if you open your heart to them, open
your heart to them.
Love Poem to the Sky
You didn’t know it then
but you broke my terrible fucking heart.
I want to lie and say that
I’m standing in a frozen field
being slowly covered with snow
so you’ll see me that way,
and remember
the best of what I can be,
all piercing shrapnel aside.
Among corn flowers, in the autumn’s cool,
We’d walked holding hands, imagining
they could keep us together
against the pull of time.
But what betrayal does to love
is like an emptiness that grows,
when all it would have taken
was a touch.
Elegy for Gaza
I knew it wasn’t the sky that was falling,
but that’s what the world felt like,
all death and degradation,
everywhere you turned. Bombs
are not like stars exploding,
ask anyone under siege,
and war
is not like the news.
You have to hear the screams
to know the difference,
and feel
the concussive ripples
pass through you like a shudder,
before you understand.
I need someone to finish this poem.
I need someone to help me.
Things You Could Say About the Night
It is inhabited by spirits
voluntarily.
It waits for a decent lullaby.
It is a fine place to keep things,
like secrets
you want no one else to see or know.
Memory flashes past, a fast river
where the body washes up
on the shore of no one’s longing
but your own. What is unbearable
is not the empty, not even the alone,
but the disembowelment of stars,
all across your native sky, bloody love.
An Extraordinary Blessing
Because I’d pissed on the radiator in the bathroom we shared
with our upstairs apartment neighbors
when I was four years old,
I was made to stand beside it,
and breathe in the pungent urine steam
that rose like a sacrifice, my father,
a black leather belt
hung from one hand like a dead snake,
beside me, watching me suffer, sulking
in disappointment at my failures.
I’d tried to tell him that I’d been asleep
when it had happened, that I didn’t remember
until now, where I was, but he wouldn’t have it,
and he told me to stand there
and smell the stink I’d made,
that human acid,
and then to tell him how I liked it.
Winter and the New Year
I know there isn’t anything to say,
a redwing black bird passed this way
caught up inside a gust of wind,
it didn’t fight, it knew it couldn’t win,
and took instead the shape of things to come.
Epistolary to a Friend Considering Suicide
That’s not a broken star you see
wobbling through your native sky,
only a tangle of thoughts
you couldn’t untangle,
so don’t exaggerate your pain;
it’s bad enough
without amplification of any kind.
And how has the overgrown,
weed-choked garden
turned so remarkably red,
just before winter
if there isn’t any hope,
and why does the white-streaked blue sky
still call to you across the distance of your life
laid out now in a straight line like a movie
you can watch? This, my poor offering,
and praise for the wild spirit that you are.
For the Sesquicentennial of R. F.
Quieted by wonder, I walk out
into midnight snow, certain,
for a change, about what I was doing.
The immaculate quiet,
and the cold
let me hear the sound of the snow
as it fell across the leafless trees,
a quiet ticking. It isn’t madness
that makes you want to know
the heart of things,
but it’s like a madness,
an abandonment, so you may feel
the urgent flow of energy
between all things
and stand out in the freezing snow
becoming what you are.
Parable
Point the pistol towards the ground
Towards the ground point the pistol
Pistol the point, ground the towards
Ground the pistol towards the point
Psychiatric Rag
Memory acts like it still wants you
to feel the thing in the picture
that won’t clear from your head
the spider webs of trauma,
and don’t forget about the loving the pain part,
and missing it when it’s gone,
like a lover through the quick rain.
I watched the Father bless
a cache of weapons
and all our bloody ammunition
the morning we were to set out
up a single hill
where we would die,
and I wondered at the act,
and at the moment,
that still wants me to feel it, and I can,
holding me like a brother, or like a lover,
you see, all twisted arms and legs askew.
Saga Nineteen Fifty-seven
I was throwing the tennis ball up to the roof of our company house
and waiting for it to come down, an urban outfielder,
my mother and father at work, and at seven years old
I was free within the limits of my neighborhood,
with strict instructions to stay away from the railyard
where the hobos gathered in the evening,
eating their dinner from cans.
Little traffic on my street and the neighborhood
quiet except for railcars slamming together,
when I heard a siren spinning closer
from across the way. It was coming down the main drag
at the corner, so I stood out in the driveway to watch it pass
and saw instead a motorcycle stream up the street
and in a flash, just at my block, it tried to make the turn
but too fast, it tipped and I watched it slide against the curb,
the police car arriving at nearly the same moment.
I walked over to take a look, the policeman on his radio,
and I saw the face of the man
who’d crashed his motorcycle
and recognized him from the neighborhood.
I knew both his names and I said them out loud to him.
I was seven years old, and I wanted to call him back
from what I imagined was his death,
but his eyes were open, and he smiled at me,
the side of his face scraped raw by the pavement.
It’s not only what happens to you that matters,
and that adds up to become something in your life,
but also what you bear witness to,
the unimaginable moments
that cling like fine dust, that never let you go.
An Ars Poetica
Although the answer isn’t always rain,
I come to that again,
the sound like pity through the empty trees,
a vast gray sky opening itself
to the coming dark.
What is this longing to know
even the pain that must abide in us all,
and to see into things
deep enough to feel.
I don’t know,
but only the emptiness lasts forever.
and the rain continues to fall
like vaguely made promises
through the not yet frozen branches.
See, not everything means something
in that ordinary way of things,
and what is measured and accounted for
is usually lost
before we even see its brilliance.
This is the nature of poetry and death,
how every end of line is like a precipice
you must discover in the dark to make your way,
the last distinguished thing.