When We Came Back

AND HOW WE LIVED OUR LIVES

He was student body president
at the university, and became the voice
I followed as he trailed Cacciato
in and out of the war. When the war
opened for me twenty years later
I looked again and wrote my poems,
this time wondering if.
                                    Would we
ever cross stories?

The small college I returned to
after I came home in 1968,
was bringing him to town
for The Big Read. He had been
infantry, 11B in Quang Tri Province
in 69 and 70, had encountered
the ghosts of my time. His unit
had re-entered My Lai
before it had come out,
uncovered itself, the government
pinning guilt
on Lieutenant Calley
what was everywhere.

Qui Nhon, Binh Dinh Province,
bordering Quang Tri from the south
where two evac hospitals,
67th Evac and 85th Evac took casualties
round the clock, from January through July
when bombing stopped,
is where I was--at the 85th.

I write in Jubilee time
across 50 years, remembering
what got written on forms
for every casualty
who made it to us,
the narrative of what happened.
The narrative repeated hundreds
and hundreds of times each month,
repeating itself in numbers
that cannot be named,
named or numbered.
The revelation
in chapter and verse.
Still trying to bring it down to size.
Still trying to see it was that big.
My time. What he wrote about.  
When I was, well, earlier                                                 



DRESSED IN ORANGE BASEBALL CAP WITH BLACK LETTERS
READING HENDRIX IN ALL CAPS, BLACK BLAZER,
SLACKS, SHORT, JUST ABOUT SAME HEIGHT AS ME,
AND A SKINNY GREEN TIE WITH RED SPLOTS,
O'BRIEN HAS BEGUN WHEN I WALK IN TO TAKE MY SEAT


Vivid immediate bang, first words,
how the misfit became the misfit.

...the stink of a half-truth...
   
figure out the context
what he's trying to do, where he's going--
that'll tell you who he is
what I'm trying to do
where I'm going
who I am

What's that in the air
cottonwood

Just into his 70s arms wrapped
around Hemingway's ice berg
Explanation doesn't explain dyslexics don't become killers
Outside that hotel room, that cat in the rain
that woman, the man on the bed

Where the father comes into the story
Drinking at the VFW, drinking at the grain elevator,
Smart things to say so he'd stop drinking
Mother looking out the window
and the young wife and the cat in the rain
The craft of it, bad and mediocre telling
leave no room for the reader

Yesterday, for example,

Walking into this room
I gave my father the book and he told me
it was too much like real life
The other one had his Hemingway
Ice bergs and vanishing fathers

I gave up writing sentences

I committed myself to the sentence

What had once been fun for me hardened.
Where I tried to be me let up
Now once in a while

I walked out
just walked

this is how
it once was

it once was
how is this

this once was
this was once

This meditation in green
this sideways awful

What wants to be kept
and doesn't belong

For me it all mirrored
young black girls boarding
the city bus
with their
God bless


BONSAI SENSEI LECTURES FOR EIGHT HOURS ON WATERING TREES

After I returned from Japan, these trees
Sensei said, Wire it like this, so that the branches will follow
He looked at it and said, It's all wrong, it's all wrong, this is the worst,
and just like that I was no longer a soldier

Ultimate health
resisting everything
we're going to do to it
it needs to be healthy

Dr. Earth
with its good bacteria
equal numbers

Work around the poet
once a month
with little hills of food

The three things
trees need
water retention
oxygen
lava, pumice, akadama

Moving soil cuts roots
Every pot needs top soil
to stabilize

Jim Bodeen
25 April--12 May 2017



No comments:

Post a Comment