Bruce Weigl - Song of Napalm: Poems

BOOKS BY BRUCE WEIGLPOETRY Song of Napalm The Monkey Wars A Romance The Executioner A Sack Full of Old Quarrels CRITICISM The Imagination As Glory: On the Poetry of James Dickey (coeditor, with T. R. Hummer) The Giver of Morning: On Dave Smith (editor) SONG OF NAPALM

POEMS by Bruce Weigl Copyright 1988 by Bruce Weigl Introduction copyright 1988 by Robert Stone All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003. 1. 1.

Vietnames Conflict, 19611975Poetry. I. Title. PS3573.E3835S65 1988 811.54 88-6161 eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9517-3 Design by Julie Duquet Atlantic Monthly Press 841 Broadway New York, NY 10003

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which many of these poems first appeared: Back Door, The Black Warrior Review, Field, Ironwood, Mother Jones, The Missouri Review, The New England Review, Open Places, Quarterly West, Tendril, and Tar River Poetry. The Last Lie appeared originally in Poetry Now. Sailing to Bien Hoa appeared originally in Western Humanities Review.

Song of Napalm, Amnesia, Snowy Egret, The Kiss, Apparition of the Exile, and Breakdown appeared originally in TriQuarterly, a publication of Northwestern University. The Way of Tet and On the Anniversary of Her Grace appeared originally in Prairie Schooner, and appears by permission of University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 1988 by the University of Nebraska Press. Monkey, Mines, Hand to Hand, The Sharing, Dogs, Him, on the Bicycle, When Saigon Was French, Convoy, Sailing to Bien Hoa, Short, A Romance, and Anna Grasa appeared in A Romance (The University of Pittsburgh Press, 1979); Amnesia, Surrounding Blues on the Way Down, Temple Near Quang Tri, Not on the Map, The Last Lie, Burning Shit at An Khe, Song for the Lost Private, Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry, Mercy, Snowy Egret, and Song of Napalm appeared in The Monkey Wars (The University of Georgia Press, 1984). Temple Near Quang Tri, Not on the Map also appeared in Pushcart V (1980). Additionally, many of these poems appeared in the following anthologies: Carrying the Darkness: American IndochinaThe Poetry of the Vietnam War; New American Poets of the 80s; Reading the Wind: Literature of the Vietnam War; The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets; The Writer in Our World (Atlantic Monthly Press); Unwinding the Vietnam War; Vietnam Anthology: American War Literature; Vietnam Reconsidered: Lessons from a War.

The author would also like to thank the following people for their special assistance and support: Gloria Emerson, Stuart Friebert, Ann Godoff, Larry Moffi, Phil Raisor, Charles Simic, Dave Smith, Alberta Turner, James Wright, David Young, and Paul Zimmer. For Miss Tao of the tiger cage My home, my country,
the heart split in two And for Reg Gibbons

Wars are meant to be forgotten, the Vietnam War like any other. Memory resists them. Their reality bleeds away, surviving in fragments. The fragments are elusive, drifting apart. The mist that covers Dak To this morning covers them.

They are enfolded in their own darkness. Sometimes a single recollected moment lights up the sky of memory and brings it all back. The minds eye fills with broken sunlight and soiled rain. Pieces of time assemble, counting off, strung along the pulse, in breaths, in heartbeats. Its all burned in; the dreams inseparable from the dreamer. Song of Napalm is poetry performed in defiance of physical and moral death.

It is compounded of explosive moments that illuminate a terrifying landscape, that lead us into the fire and out under the swollen black sky. Its incantatory power confronts us with that sense, particular to war, of things going utterly out of control, of all promises and sane assumptions being subsumed in limitless violence. The poet compels our complicity as his witnesses. Every line carries his distinctive voice; his special sensibility is such a constant presence that he seems to suffer and laugh unsoundly and be amazed right there beside us as we read his impacted, precise verse. He pursues every act and image to its essence, displays it for us and shakes it for meaning, strips it and puts it together again. His starkest lines are full of vitality and the energy of observation.

Each captured fraction of experience is subjected to relentless scrutiny. Again and again, he brings us to the outer limits of our reference point, to that dread zone of the spirit where wars are fought and survived. Bruce Weigls poetry is a refusal to forget. It is an angry assertion of the youth and life that was spent in Vietnam with such vast prodigality, as though youth and life were infinite. Through his honesty and toughmindedness, he undertakes the traditional duty of the poet: in the face of randomness and terror to subject things themselves to the power of art and thus bring them within the compass of moral comprehension. Robert Stone SONG OF NAPALM

Out of the horror there rises a musical ache that is beautiful James Wright In my dream of the hydroplane Im sailing to Bien Hoa the shrapnel in my thighs like tiny glaciers.

I remember a flower, a kite, a mannequin playing the guitar, a yellow fish eating a bird, a truck floating in urine, a rat carrying a banjo, a fool counting the cards, a monkey praying, a procession of whales, and far off two children eating rice, speaking French Im sure of the children, their damp flutes, the long line of their vowels.

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 couldnt have them, they were wet Who wouldve 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.

Year of the monkey, year of the human wave, the people smuggled weapons in caskets through the city in long processions undisturbed and buried them in Saigon graveyards. At the feet of their small Buddhas weary bar girls burned incense before the boy soldiers arrived to buy them tea and touch them where they pleased. Twenty years and the feel of a girls body so young theres no hair is like a dream, but living is a darker thing, the iron burning bee who drains the honey, and he remembers her twisting in what evening light broke into the small room in the shack in the labyrinth of shacks in the alley where the lost and corrupted kept house. He undressed her for the last time, each piece of clothing a sacrifice she surrendered to the war the way the world had become. Tomorrow blood would run in every province.Next page