TOURISTS IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY
It’s raining and raining hard
In the Forbidden City . This
is Hue
In monsoon. I stand before steps
At the gate too steep
To safely climb. Rain courses
From steps faster than it falls
A slippery fungus-like growth
Has turned them slippery
Like ice except one doesn’t
Think of ice, we try to listen
To the guide talk of the emperor,
his family, the concubines,
the eunuch, and yes,
the mandarins, too,
we are tourists and this
is the Imperial
City
the Nguyen regime—
this is consolidation of power
and Nguyen Du
stifled here, writing
The Tale of Kieu
Lifting Vietnam ’s
literature
Into the epic
But
the rain
Has soaked us all, penetrated
My poncho, cameras
Are worthless and smack
Just like that one of the tourists
In our group falls,
A doctor emerges from anonymity
And diagnoses a clean break
And she will be carried out,
Evacuated,
My job in this country
40 years ago come back to me
That fast—here is where
I grew up when our soldiers,
18 and 19 were hit and wounded
Senseless, sleeping under bridges
Today for having come here
And I sent them home.
Make no mistake
I’m here to see this place
To stand in this rain
To imagine it all
Soaking in a tourist’s poncho
Full of color, fully penetrated
And wet, knowing the dangers
Of steps steeped in tropical moss
In a monsoon, unable to imagine
The terror of young soldiers
In uniform betrayed
By their country and sent here
To be shot and evacuated
I gathered
fragments
Of what happened as part
Of my training for this morning
There’s a helicopter out my window
Emergency rooms have never
Been reported from
Nurses chose to be girlfriends
And lovers and mothers
Over and over
It happened that fast again
And again night and day
That terror of Tet
In this wet, wet rain
Of my apprenticeship
Jim Bodeen
30 December 2008
SURPRISES AT THE
IN HO CHI MINH CITY
It would take me a month
After I came home this time
To understand that these photos
Unsettling Americans off busses
Began to be assembled in Kentucky —
But standing before them
I knew the dream vision
Occupied the room before
We arrived. Dak To, Hill 875,
How many times had I read
Those words, written them
Myself, bringing GI’s
Off planes for surgery
Before evacuating out of country?
Here is what it looked like for
one:
GI in forefront of burned out
Landscape. Tree trunks left
Like crosses for Jesus and
Barrabas,
Scorched and cleaned. Fallen, too,
Crossing each other in back
Of the soldier with pot on,
Right leg crossed under left,
Cigarette in mouth, holding
A camera, strap around his neck.
I’d seen the GI, but never
The landscape. And then,
After Dak To, A Shau Valley
We took all those casualties
Also, and the tree stumps
Had turned into burned-out crosses
Here, too. In this one, a photo
Of a photo, remember,
A GI rolls over felled tree
Leg high in air, rifle in right
Hand, butt tucked under shoulder—
Two years out of high school?
Maybe impregnated,
The rifle, naked like the trees.
Peter Arnett wrote the caption,
War painted living and dead
The same gray pallor
On Hill 875…Only the dead
Didn’t move, propped up
In bunkers where they died…
We took all the wounded
Without seeing where they
Had come from. As I glue
These photos of photos
In my notebook, I’m trying
To remember those faces
We talked with briefly—
Our job was to get them out
As fast as possible—
Get them home—
Believing that stories
And poems can bury
A war and resurrect
The body. Surrounded
By photographs, I’m also
Held by them, photographs
And men, both. One image
Of mine, sculpture of American
Children releasing the dove
In front of a windowed panel
Describing the war, creating
A texture and a layer for any
To enter, to become bird
Or child, or witness.
Jim Bodeen
6 January 2009
ABSTRACTION, INCONGRUITY, HUMAN VALUES
To know the country
In ways other than war
Allows me to return
And look at what happened.
My photos are too literal
But you can’t tell what they are—
And what about all that Chinese?
Why can’t you leave it alone?
If you want a narrative
That makes sense,
Write a story, but you’ll face
The same three problems
You put in the title.
This is triangulation of expression.
Did you say strangulation?
I said it’s your blank stage.
Jim Bodeen
18 December 2008
For Joy
Even after climbing Hai Van Pass
Through clouds and lifted
Into the Forbidden City in
mist,
When a companion sends a note
Promising Vietnam
photos
I see myself in the evacuation hospital
Not on the journey north
To the Temple
of Literature
More work to do with this light.
More air to breathe.
Still three more hours of darkness
In Yakima .
It is Guadalupe’s Day.
Horns will begin soon
Reminding us of Her miracles
In a holocaust closer to home.
Pagodas promise smoke and wonder.
Jim Bodeen
12 December 2008
THE FORBIDDEN CITY
For Karen
My lie wasn’t this, the promise
Of the love story. No. My lie
Promised confusion—
Like My Son and Son My—
The ambition to break all rules
For your love. Models already
To be found here, verify.
I based my love on failed love,
All that I knew. You came along.
We walked lost together.
The dangerous path
Arrived elsewhere.
We became lovers
In your quiet ways.
Jim Bodeen
17 December 2008
SUNDAY IN
After breakfast we take a taxi
To the Temple
of Literature
During the wars and rebuilt. We walk through
The red doors and walked through them again.
I stand in the doorway surrounded by all this red—
Red doors, red door frames, red shadows
From sunlight passing through a red entranceway.
We stop and talk to the children and photograph them
And they surround us with questions—their teacher
Has given them questions to ask—we laugh together
As we look at instant images of all of us
In this ancient place built for poetry.
Karen and I take pictures of each other in front of the
doors.
The red doors are an investment.
Study like it’s all being taken away, Confucius says.
Review what you have learned and study anew
And you are fit to be a teacher, Confucius says.
Alberto and Armida walk with us through the gates
From Columbia ,
they began belonging to two places
And now they walk into this.
Turtles and Stellae were buried in sand for protection
During the bombing. Sand will never be the same.
Seeing these turtles, I too become a parable.
Karen wants a bag made by the Hmong people
And we wave goodbye to our new friends, walking again.
I buy two dolls, a man and a woman, dressed traditionally
In colors woven by hand. We walk the streets of Hanoi
Looking for silk, looking for coffee, the right piece of
jade.
Lost now, two cyclos promise a new way
And we eat baguettes on the street as they pedal us
Through market streets teeming with people.
We have seen the movie the people can’t see.
We know just this much of our privilege.
We drink Vietnamese coffee and a fruit smoothie.
Karen finds three silk shirts for Todd ,
Steven and Tim.
I buy coffee for friends. It is Sunday we are in
shirtsleeves
In Hanoi ,
the city of a thousand years.
We carry two cameras and take 200 pictures.
We walk around the lakes and the many parks
Until we get lost and sit by two men enjoying the day
On the park bench. We talk to each other
In different languages and laugh. Only our laughter
Is understood. We will take a taxi each time
We get this lost and we will take three taxis.
We will get the taxis lost too. Karen
Will show them a map and we’ll laugh again.
Karen knows when to take out the map.
We eat ice cream on the street
And Karen photographs me with two monks
Walking outside of the pagoda
Near where John McCain fell from the sky
In his parachute. I will watch two boys fishing
From the sidewalk, the one boy wearing
A blue jean jacket that says Reebok.
We greet everyone who looks at us and smile.
Confucius smiles at us in approval.
Karen wants to enter the pagoda.
We lose each other walking around the Buddha.
Karen has her nails done.
I get a hair cut on the street.
Two old men make me very happy
Standing beside me while Karen takes pictures.
Karen and I have been holding hands
Walking in cities for more than 40 years.
I rub her feet with lotion in the hotel room
While she reads to me from Confucius.
Look at the surface but see the meaning behind.
We know we have to pack our bags tonight.
We do not go to the mausoleum to see Ho Chi Minh.
But Hung, our guide, tells us Ho is back, and rested.
He vacations each year in Russia . He goes for two months.
He’s back and looks good. Every time we cross a bridge
I remind myself I’m in Hanoi .
We think of the revolution,
And Uncle Ho reading Thomas Jefferson,
And we say, Yes. It has been days since I talked
With my children. 40 years ago I was here,
In the South. Karen was 9,000 miles away.
I wrote to her every day and she wrote to me.
I said to her in the letters, I want to be your husband.
It is the only thing that I want in life.
You and the poem are one.
You are the only one that matters to me.
You. I will build a life with you.
We will build it around literature.
Literature will make me possible for you.
Jim Bodeen
30 November 2008
THE POET AND THE DOCTOR IN THE
Here it’s close quarters. The junk rented
To tourists had another life hauling munitions
During the American war. Americans
forbidden to fire were not pursuing nonviolence.
Munitions under cover
Would pass American ships as though
They were given safe passage.
The poet and the doctor are tourists
In pleasure. The poet has been watching
The doctor all week, biting his lip,
Trying not to make jokes with his wife
When he sees the doctor as cowboy
In his campesino hat, string pulled tight
Under his chin, instead of behind his neck
Like vaqueros. (How could the doctor know
The poet was a campesino out of uniform?)
Was the doctor preoccupied?—taking the microphone
From the hand of the guide, adding his commentary
On the culture. The poet, watching closely,
has not put a condemning word on paper.
(He’s sifting through strategies.)
The doctor assumes all listen
When he speaks. He’s from that generation.
He volunteers his medicine
In the third world, too. Although he has not spoken
To the poet, and the poet has made note of this,
The doctor knows there’s a poet on board.
When the doctor takes the microphone
From the local guide, he might make
Be making nuance, he might be singing Karaoke.
The doctor is an important man
And is used to his importance. In a perfect world
There would be no guide to share the microphone.
The poet, too, claims vision. He works undercover,
A subversive for truth. Now they’re on this junk.
Surrounded by beauty, the chartered boat
Winds its way through limestone islands
Promising invisibility and breakthrough.
This is Halong Bay outside of Hanoi .
The poet and the doctor point their cameras
In the same direction, take digital photographs
Of the same image. Ha Long Bay
destination and sanctuary of UNESCO.
No bombs. No war. Together by chance.
Ha Long Bay is part of the Gulf of Tonkin
The Gulf
of Tonkin
The bridges that brought them are new.
Bombs failed in ferocious explosions
During the war for liberation. The marine
traveling with them, on his own search will talk,
Tell what he knew: Christmas
bonfire,
He whispers to the poet, That’s
how pilots
Climbed into their
planes. Christmas bonfire,
Linebacker
One,Linebacker Two,
That’s the way they
said go.
That’s what he told the poet. This is part
Of what the poet listens for. This was the war.
The poet was on the other end of the hospital.
The marine helped him see.
The guide says Vietnamese hold no grudges,
Aren’t interested in revenge. The poet
Knows the doctor may have been one of those
Performing heroic surgery on soldiers. This day
Is like a day at the beach. Sunshine. Picnic—
Vietnamese cooking a 7-course meal.
Swimming in the bay. Everything good.
Possibilities for a funny poem?
Maybe the poet takes the doctor’s towel
By accident. Something happens.
The doctor screams from the water.
The poet cries from the boat.
The fight itself, too trivial to recount.
The pleasure junk in blue water
Does not add to poetry or medicine.
Reconciliation falls the way
Of a ship of fools. Ghandi
is not on this boat. No peace talks here.
The poem bears witness only to this.
The poet wanted to write a poem.
The doctor only wanted to swim and dry off.
Objective correlative will not get
The poet out of this one. He knows
Nothing of the doctor.
Nothing more can be said.
Jim Bodeen
26 November—17 December 2008
FIRST OF ALL,
“I’d
make a list poem an American Vietnam Vet carries to Vietnam
With
his wife on their 40th Anniversary…You’ll go beyond being a poet’s
poet:
All
poets are poets’ poets.” Zev Shanken
“poet:
“nha tho”, pronounced ‘knee AH TUH’, again with ‘bai’ in a low downward tone
and the second syllable in a neutral tone with a bit more emphasis—‘tho’ means
poetry, and ‘nha’ is the article place in front of most educated/respected
professions, (scientist, scholar, king, farmer, journalist…); ‘nha’ also means
‘house’ or ‘home’…so ‘nha tho’ does mean poet in a very direct sense, but in
the spirit of the language it’s also a little like saying ‘I am a house of
poetry,’ or poetry resides in me’. Kim-An Lieberman
I see that I am carried by my friends, poets, who are poets’ poets,
And live with me in the house of poetry—poetry resides in
them,
And they give me all that they have, knowing the gift is
always enough,
the bearer an imperfect vessel.
Packing and unpacking is all we do,
Beggars that we are. This mess in the living room is only
detritus, the poem
Which we clean daily. My mother taught me to wash floors on
my knees.
I see that the notebook opens the door to the people. Photos
of then and now.
Photos of Go Thi Gam before
her rabies vaccinations show arms wrapped
And protecting me, the vulnerable one needing validation. The hospital
Is only a workshop of doors created for narrative. I don’t
see
Any keys in any of the photos. Rolled sleeves cover my
stripes. I couldn’t
See Her making me one of the apprenticed. I am subversive,
But unaware, unknowing, until holding Neruda surrounded
By Pinochet and his carabineros
in a small bookstore in Valdivia .
My glasses aren’t ready when we fly. Yesterday in the house
of glass
And mirrors I say, I’ll pay for these glasses but they don’t
help me see.
That scratch on my cornea is why I’m here. I came to say
thanks.
To borrow and resist. Nothing is ours. Nothing.
From this limited role, I see how far we’ve come from 1968.
Photos side by side. Others tell me, We are not the
same person.
No one needs to tell me about Karen’s beauty—but even Karen,
From the other side of the ocean, wrote letters
Borrowing and resisting in order to save herself
From all that had not yet been forged into literature.
On a boat on the Mekong River
in Ho Chi Minh City
I say, This boat will never leave the dock, when the engine
Turns to the woman in gold sequins swallowing fire
So that young men can light cigarettes.
These are only the beginning of the river dreams.
Huynh Sanh Thong gives me a thousand years of poems
With notes, liberating us all from China , but in order to get
Folk poems in miniature I must ride the river boat
On the Mekong and put paper
money in plastic flowers
For all that feeds the dream and is not music.
I underline, The Tale
of Kieu. Kim-An
Suggests I carry it in a bilingual edition.
The young woman at the desk in the 5-Star hotel
Feels her heart. The
language, she says, is already
changed.
I see rubber trees arrive at Cu Chi, witnessing the French
before my eyes in Indochine.
I tour tunnels,
But do not go down. O’Brien went down with Cacciato—
Akins went down in real time. Staying above ground
I learn to recognize B-52 craters. I will see them
Again and again in the ruins of My Son—my camera
Will find craters holding monsoon rain reflecting
Still standing altars for Shiva built by the Cham
A thousand years earlier—perhaps already dizzy,
Crossing between India
and China .
I walk Silk Road in Hoi An with
Karen
Wrapping her in shawls (and ao dais from memory).
Buying dolls for grandchildren I see the privilege
Of those who walk with children. We give voice
To song and will never be canaries. I am 22 again,
In charge of medical evacuation. I work for a black captain.
Ship loads of casualties from Quang Tri and Quang Ngai
After Tet come through Qui Nhon. I see the Forbidden
City explode.
I see My Lai in every
village. Most of the soldiers, 18,
And from cities, trained with guns on firing ranges,
Pushed from helicopters by their own country.
I am under cover on the Perfume River
Disembarking the boat barefoot because it is safer to walk
The stone steps to the Thien Mu Pagoda in rain.
My feet sink to my ankles in the greenest grass
Of succulent jungle and Karen takes my hand. We stand
before the rusting blue Austin of Thich Quang Duc,
The monk who drove from this monastery to Saigon
and set
Himself ablaze in 1963. The seven story tower of Thien Mu
Heavenly Lady, is itself a poem, a response to the mystic
Female voice from 1601, calling for its creation, here,
Above the Perfume
River
Remember, walking from water. I am given search and story,
fragments from each wound, millions of stitches,
after Tet, in 1968. Where it happened. When. The date
each soldier arrived in country and when he was hit.
The extent of the wounds. What hospital can best treat
This trauma? Wards, too, for those frozen under bombs
From B-52s, wrapped forever in mountains of gauze.
GI’s in and out of the country before they can learn
A geography or place name. Tours shorter than
Any family vacation. Wounded
in liminal time, sent home
To war in America
where there is no sanctuary. Out of this
Necessity, the hospital exchanges story fragments for blood
As it glimpses Quang Tri, a fire blossom. I walk
Back to the boat, delirious, dizzy, closer to Keats
And Buddha, complete in the in-between. The house boat
belongs
to a single family. They ferry us to make do. One room
Is a window of commerce on the river. Karen spends all we
have.
I ask for the handheld rhythm instruments,
Wooden mallets for cut pieces of echoing rhythm
For our chants, one for each of my friends who hold me
In parable. I hear all of this. It is given on the Perfume River
I am beside myself. I never want to come in from this rain.
I say this to Karen. Today there will be one pagoda after
another.
Monsoon rains wash me wet and warm, releasing me.
Do not worry about your
feet. You do not have to keep them dry.
There will be no
fungus between your toes from these rains.
Does not remember his poem, My mother was a cotton flower
Stark white and
wholesome, and I am a cotton yarn.
Young people dismiss that war ever happened.
Poets feel how war moves, and how second languages
Change from Chinese to French to Russian, to English.
The one legged man in the street recognizes me
Asking for Piastres. We know each other from hospital
Dreamtime. We shared beds in the same ward. Ha Long Bay
Ran munitions south in junks before these boats became
sanctuaries
Of UNESCO. Swimming in safe waters I dry myself
With the crew member’s towel. Treading water in the safe
bay,
He shouts: Dó la cua
toi! Do la cua toí! It’s mine! It’s mine.
We’re both laughing. I throw it to him knowing he’s found a
way
beyond regret or treaty, both of us held by pleasure, the
irrelevance
Of history. Kim-An searches out one more word: storypath.
“A tough one”, she says in her words, “… cobbling… to get
‘duong chuyen’ road of story’ pronounced ‘DUung tcheweUNt’
first syllable low downward tone + second as above…if you
wanted to get alliterative, maybe ‘chuyen chuyen = flight of
story
first syllable sliding upward like answering someone
with the response ‘yes?’ but my mom says neither of these
terms
Make any sense to her in Vietnamese, and she suggested
More idiomatic terms like ‘chuyen doi’ story of life/that’s
life.”
And that’s how the bus takes us into Ha Noi, our guide
Translating Ha Noi as city
inside a river.
Water puppets create the metaphor in river traffic,
Always below the surface of things. I wonder about music
Coming from singers above water, beyond audience,
Knowing I’ll do whatever they ask. Sunday Karen
Walks me through the citadel of old town. The cyclo driver
Is the poet who helped build the highway South.
Karen buys silk from a bolt to make a quilt from Molas
Sewn by San Blas Indians from Panama .
I get a Hmong hat made from patches of cloth
And two Hmong dolls for the Singing Room. Wooden faces,
Wooden hands and feet come from handmade clothes.
Zev steps from his poem into parentheses: (I wish I had an image;
It would transcend the
sermonizing idea like an anniversary trip
transcends what was,
or else why bother to go?)
We work inside circles, traffic in story.
Jim Bodeen
3 December 2008
For the poets’ poets Kim-An Lieberman and Zev Shanken
FOUR PLASTIC BINS
Karen goes out and buys four plastic bins
To put the letters in. Higher than envelope high.
About two shoe boxes long. She’s been through them,
To browse and organize. Letters:
1965-67, Jim to Karen;
Miscellaneous Stuff
1967-1968.
After pulling letters from the basement on Sunday,
I photographed the boxes that kept them for 40 years.
I grabbed a couple of random letters, photographed them.
All this happened just before lunch.
Adrenalin and hunger knocked us off balance.
We bagged a couple of handfuls each
And went to lunch, reading while we waited for salads.
Karen brought beauty I carried in my wallet at 22.
The young waitress saw it, too. We couldn’t stop the tears
To finish the salads. I couldn’t look at the letters
For the rest of the week. This morning, up early,
The letters called. I’ll just look at a few,
I said to myself, starting with the day I left
The nam, working backwards, wondering.
It’s the 12th of August, 1968, my grandmother’s
Birthday, my last day in Vietnam ,
Working 85th Evac Hospital
South China Sea, below Da
Nang ,
Across from Pleiku. Working back
To Kennedy and King, gunned down
In America .
Writing after elections here,
A nation in crisis again, but with a new President
Poised with hope, Barack Obama.
Here’s what I found this morning:
Mama Sanh’s daughter, Go
Thi Gam,
Who needed the rabbi’s shots, recovered.
Stars and Stripes reports riots in Seattle .
Be careful. This too, to Karen:
Maybe when are old you can sew,
And I’ll tape music for the kids—
Some of that crazy stuff.
Read an article on Montagnyards
In National Geographic. 59 days (left)
In country (short), and I feel fine.
Fresh casualties, and regurge.
Vietnamese flooding the hospital
Looking for family members.
The day is finally over, and I’m finishing
A second class letter. I don’t care
If you have your hair frosted.
I don’t care if you cut it all off.
With a month left incountry
I took an R&R to Australia , flew on a C-123
Cargo plane to Cam Ranh Bay,
And reading Leon Uris’ Armageddon,
While awaiting a flight out, write to Karen,
“He is not a great writer.”
Jim Bodeen
IN THE MARI SANDOZ CRAZY HORSE CAMP
CEREMONY IS AS MATTER-OF-FACT AS FIRE
EVERYONE TRAVELS FROM A GREAT DISTANCE
THIS IS THE VISION FEATHER
MEN WITH THICK EARS CAN TELL WHAT HAS BEEN SAID
EARS FOR THE PEOPLE ARE A GREAT GIFT
EVERYTHING IS AN UNFINISHED STORY
We keep the strong black medicine, coffee.
We say no to whiskey.
We shed the fat of the soldier food.
Someone will say something of the world behind this one.
This is why we have come.
We accept the fact that we are a broken people.
We have left people behind to come here.
Women go with the ones they choose,
Openly, untroubled, as is their right.
We do not turn our broken sides to each other.
The hearts of our women are not dust. We are not whipped.
We are shirt wearers. We are big-hearted.
The shirts show the solid world of our new life.
We will resist the reservation. We will not go in.
We are defenseless, but we are strategists.
We will use the earth for cover.
We are warriors. We have discipline.
Our enemies will not hurt us.
We are vigilant before our own people.
From defeat we have achieved a new fierceness,
A new kind of recklessness.
There can be no anger in the heart.
We will not stay here forever.
You learn how to go off by yourself.
You learn that you belong to others.
We have been shadow-marked.
Breathing together we cross through language.
Breathing together we cross through division.
No one can say what our work will be
When we belong to the people.
We will see like Crazy Horse.
And we will act like Crazy Horse.
Crazy Horse, remember, is a promise.
Crazy Horse is a very tough promise.
You want passion.
Beside passion everything is grass.
Jim Bodeen
MUSIC CALLING US HOME
Curtis Stigers’’ You Inspire Me, from Bob Dylan’s,
It ain’t me Babe, the organ solo making it impossible
To cut the engine in the hotel parking lot. Oh, song
Without end, you won’t let me out of the car.
The two of us sick and getting sicker,
Coming back from a play at the Rep,
You driving out of traffic through Queen Anne
After the play, showing off what you know about
Managing Seattle
traffic, seeing 3d Avenue
Where you grew up from the other side above the hill
I never could figure out the Bay of
Pigs
We were faced with it tonight. I still overread
When I come on it in news stories. I slow my reading,
Maybe this time, you talking about junior high friends,
Linda Batista and her boyfriend Castro,
Junior high school kids laughing at what they think
They know. Forty three years ago on our first date,
At the theatre, Try to remember. The young man,
Taking off and leaving, in the Fantastiks, how we began
Together at 19, how I ran, the kind of September
In the first New
Orleans hurricane. Tonight we’re watching
There’s war, too, in those 43 years. And I’m trying
To read the last pages of a novel. You’re with me
In the doctor’s office and I’ve got a bad esophagus.
That’s why we’re here. We’re with the specialists,
In Seattle ,
and there’s trouble in the throat.
A woman comes in and sits down opposite us,
You’re reading Denis Johnson, I love Denis Johnson.
I taught Jesus’ Son
in high school. Have you read it?
Johnson is an uncomfortable read. Yes he is, Mam.
We’re here to see the same doctors, with the same
Bad throat. Too much talking. Too much trouble.
Jesus’ son going to get us all in trouble. Same-same
For Tree of Smoke.
Tree of truth that’s there
And it’s not. Looks like the mushroom coming off
The desert floor. And just that fast I’m back in the Nam .
You want to look at Poinsetta’s and Christmas decorations,
Say you know a nursery that’s full of trails.
Where? I ask and you say, and I repeat the name,
Missing a syllable. I hear a shortened word,
And it becomes rhymed to another
In my mind, then connected to a voice,
And another world. Mobeck, Mobeck,
I say, Mo Beck, Mo Muck, Mo Fuck.
And I’m no longer shopping for poinsettas
At a garden party, Ricky Nelson. This is the nam.
I’m listening to tunnel talk and Black Man.
Black Man talking to the Lieutenant,
Cherry Loot, telling him how it is, how after
The bullshit burns away, one wants deeper, not out.
Take me there, and start talking about Black Man.
Excuse me, I ask a couple in fur, Where are the trails?
Happy anniversary. I didn’t quite come back from war.
Nobody does and the country,
Whatever it was, is not the same. Black Man
It turns out, has a first name, it’s Charles.
All the bull shit gets burned away
In Johnson. He wants to die by truth,
Or for it, in search of it, frozen in it.
Sitting with GI on the plane full of soldiers
We don’t know we’re going to Vietnam
when this scene happens. I don’t even know these
lines exist, find them looking for notes from last night.
Jim Bodeen
4 November 2008
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment