Bruce Weigl

for my wife After the storm, after the rain stopped pounding, We stood in the doorway watching horses Walk off lazily across the pasture’s hill. We stared through the black screen, Our vision altered by the distance So I thought I saw a mist Kicked up around their hooves when they faded Like cut-out horses Away from us. The grass was never more blue in that light, more Scarlet; beyond the pasture Trees scraped their voices into the wind, branches Crisscrossed the sky like barbed wire But you said they were only branches. Okay. The storm stopped pounding. I am trying to say this straight: for once I was sane enough to pause and breathe Outside my wild plans and after the hard rain I turned my back on the old curses. I believed They swung finally away from me ... But still the branches are wire And thunder is the pounding mortar, Still I close my eyes and see the girl Running from her village, napalm Stuck to her dress like jelly, Her hands reaching for the no one Who waits in waves of heat before her. So I can keep on living, So I can stay here beside you, I try to imagine she runs down the road and wings Beat inside her until she rises Above the stinking jungle and her pain Eases, and your pain, and mine. But the lie swings back again. The lie works only as long as it takes to speak And the girl runs only as far As the napalm allows Until her burning tendons and crackling Muscles draw her up into that final position Burning bodies so perfectly assume. Nothing Can change that; she is burned behind my eyes And not your good love and not the rain-swept air And not the jungle green Pasture unfolding before us can deny it.

I watch the woods for deer as if I’m armed. I watch the woods for deer who never come. I know the hes and shes in autumn rendezvous in orchards stained with fallen apples’ scent. I drive my car this way to work so I may let the crows in corn believe it’s me their caws are meant to warn, and snakes who turn in warm and secret caves they know me too. They know the boy who lives inside me still won’t go away. The deer are ghosts who slip between the light through trees, so you may only hear the snap of branches in the thicket beyond hope. I watch the woods for deer, as if I’m armed.

Never mind what you think. The old man did not rush Recklessly into the coop the last minute. The chickens hardly stirred For the easy way he sang to them. Red sun is burning out Past slag heaps of the mill. The old man Touches the blade of his killing knife With his fat thumb. I’m in the backyard on a quilt Spread out under the heavy dark plums He cooks for his whiskey. He walks among the hens singing His chicken song way down in his throat Until he finds the one who’s ready And he holds her to his barrel chest. What did you think? Did you think you just jerk the bird From her roost and hack her head off? Beyond the coop I see the fleeting white dress of my grandmother As she crosses and recrosses the porch To fill the bucket with scalding water. How easy the feathers will come When she drowns them for plucking And clouds the air with a stench I can’t stand not to breathe. I’m not even a boy yet but I watch The old man sing out into the yard, His knife already at the chicken’s throat When everything begins to spin in my world— He slices off the head without a squawk, And swirls the bird in circles, a fine Blood spray fanning out far enough To reach me where I wait Obediently, where I can’t stop watching The head the old man picks up, His free hand becomes a puppet chicken Clucking at me, pecking my head with the cold beak Until I cry for him to stop, Until he pins me down, clucking, laughing, blood All over his hands. He did it so I would remember him I tell myself all these years later. He did it because it was his last summer Among us. In August he didn’t feel the fly Come into his cancerous ear and lay its eggs. He didn’t feel the maggots hatch As he sat dazed with pills in the sun. He pecked my head and laughed out of love, Out of love he snatched me roughly to his chest And sang his foreign songs way, Way down in his throat.

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 good-bye 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

When he was my age and I was already a boy my father made a machine in the garage. A wired piece of steel with many small and beautiful welds ground so smooth they resembled rows of pearls. He went broke with whatever it was. He held it so carefully in his arms. He carried it foundry to foundry. I think it was his harp, I think it was what he longed to make with his hands for the world. He moved it finally from the locked closet to the bedroom to the garage again where he hung it on the wall until I climbed and pulled it down and rubbed it clean and tried to make it work.

That night we drank warm whiskey in our parked car beyond woods now lost to the suburbs, I fell in love with you. What waited was the war like a bloody curtain, and a righteous moment when the lovely boy’s spine was snapped, then the long falling into hell. But lately, you’ve been calling me back through the years of bitter silence to tell me of another river of blood and of the highland’s howl at dusk of human voices blasted into ecstasy. That night in sweet Lorain we drank so long and hard we raised ourselves above the broken places, mill fires burning red against the sky. Why is there no end to this unraveling.

A boy who knew enough to save for something like the whim that took me downtown on the bus one lost Saturday morning of my mother’s birthday, I sat in the back where the gasoline smell made me dizzy and I closed my eyes but didn’t think of her, only of myself, basking in the light and love that would fall down on me when I handed her the box and she untied the bow to save and lifted something shining out and held it up before us like a promise taking shape for once in her hands, though I didn’t know what to buy, the bus door hissing behind me because I’m in some kind of state now, a trance that comes when you pull at the cords of light that connect the mother to the boy, the 1959 department store opening up before me like a jeweled city. In lingerie I found myself surrounded by those torsos sheened in silk, dreaming my mother, feeling the silk against me, the two of us moving through a cloudy room in a dance I can’t remember until shame comes. From out of nowhere the matron frowned, asked what I wanted, hovered over me. Confused and afraid I whispered, without thinking, The black hose with rhinestones down the seams please and pointed to the pair across the room stretched over legs on the glass counter as if about to step off and I saw her in my mind slip them on, her skirt hiked above the garters, the sun catching in her tangled hair until the matron made a sound in her throat and looked at me with eyes that said What’s wrong with you dirty boy. All the way home a sweet ache rocked me, the silver package riding my lap like a heavy wrong thing I couldn’t give up no matter how it dragged me down to a place where I could barely breathe or see or feel. Whatever happened that spinning afternoon— she ran her fingers over the rhinestone seams or she didn’t, she wore them out into an evening or kept them forever in her drawer of impossible things— doesn’t matter. I would find my way into the light of another woman into whose arms I fall nights my fingers can’t tear through the dark that eats me, the silk stretched across her breasts, the need for something womanly to raise me up pounding in my head until I curl in sleep away from those longings, ancient and blue.

There was another life of cool summer mornings, the dogwood air and the slag stink so gray like our monsoon which we loved for the rain and cool wind until the rot came into us. And I remember the boys we were the evening of our departure, our mothers waving through the train’s black pluming exhaust; they were not proud in their tears of our leaving, so don’t tell me to shut up about the war or I might pull something from my head, from my head, from my head that you wouldn’t want to see and whoever the people are might be offended. From the green country you reconstruct in your brain, from the rubble and stink of your occupation, there is no moving out. A sweet boy who got drunk and brave on our long ride into the State draws a maze every day on white paper, precisely in his room of years as if you could walk into it. All day he draws and imagines his platoon will return from the burning river where he sent them sixteen years ago into fire. He can’t stop seeing the line of trees explode in white phosphorous blossoms and the liftship sent for them spinning uncontrollably beyond hope into the Citadel wall. Only his mother comes these days, drying the fruit in her apron or singing the cup of hot tea into his fingers which, like barbed wire, web the air.