Weigl - Archeology of the circle: new and selected poems

ARCHEOLOGY OF THE CIRCLEBOOKS BY BRUCE WEIGL POETRY Executioner (1976) A Sack Full of Old Quarrels (1977) A Romance (1979) The Monkey Wars (1985) Song of Napalm (1988) What Saves Us (1992) Lies, Grace & Redemption (selected poems and an interview, edited by Harry Humes, 1995) Sweet Lorain (1996) Not on the Map (with Kevin Bowen, edited by John Deane, Dublin) TRANSLATION Poems from Captured Documents (translated from the Vietnamese with Thanh Nguyen, 1995) Mountain River: Vietnamese Poetry From the Wars: 19451995 (translated from the Vietnamese and edited with Nguyen Ba Chung and Kevin Bowen, 1998) Angel Riding a Beast, poems by Liliana Ursu (translated with the author, 1998) CRITICISM The Giver of Morning: On Dave Smith (1993) The Imagination as Glory: The Poetry of James Dickey (with T. R. Hummer, 1994) Charles Simic: Essays on the Poetry (1996) ANTHOLOGY Writing Between the Lines: An Anthology on War and Its SocialConsequences (with Kevin Bowen, 1997)

NEW AND SELECTED POEMS Bruce Weigl Copyright 1999 by Bruce Weigl 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. cm.
e-Book ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9519-7
I. cm.
e-Book ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9519-7
I.

Title.
PS3573.E3835A89 1999
811.54dc21 98-45237
CIP Design by Julie Duquet Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003 For John Leeson, who read me a poem

from The Monkey Wars (1985) On the Anniversary of Her Grace Blues at the Equinox Bear Meadow I gratefully acknowledge the generous support and vital encouragement of the editors who originally published the poems selected for this collection and the editors and publishers who published the books in which those poems were first gathered. Pigeons, Mines, Monkey, Short, and Anna Grasa are reprinted from Executioner by Bruce Weigl. Copyright 1976, reprinted by permission of the Ironwood Press and with special thanks to Michael Cuddihy for his early and enabling support and in admiration of his brave spirit. Sailing to Bien Hoa, The Deer Hunter, Convoy, and Him, on the Bicycle are reprinted from A Sack Full of Old Quarrels by Bruce Weigl. Copyright 1977, reprinted by permission of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center and with special thanks to Charles Simic and Alberta Turner for their care with this manuscript. A Romance, On This Spot, Cardinal, The Man Who Made Me Love Him, The Life Before Fear, Dogs, I Have Had My Time Rising and Singing, Painting on a Tang Dynasty Water Vessel, and The Harp are reprinted from A Romance by Bruce Weigl.

Copyright 1979, reprinted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press and with special thanks to Paul Zimmer. Amnesia, Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry, Burning Shit at An Khe, 1955, Song for the Lost Private, Killing Chickens, The Last Lie, Temple Near Quang Tri, Not on the Map, Surrounding Blues on the Way Down, Elegy for A., Noise, Regret for the Mourning Doves Who Failed to Mate, Mercy, Small Song for Andrew, The Streets, Snowy Egret, and Song of Napalm are reprinted from The Monkey Wars by Bruce Weigl. Copyright 1985, reprinted by permission of the University of Georgia Press and with special thanks to Paul Zimmer. Introduction (by Robert Stone), The Way of Tet, Some Thoughts on the Ambassador: Bong Son, 1967, LZ Nowhere, Breakdown, On the Anniversary of Her Grace, Apparition of the Exile, The Soldiers Brief Epistle, Dialectical Materialism, The Kiss, and Elegy are reprinted from Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl. Copyright 1988, reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic Press with special thanks to Gary Fiskitjon and Ann Godoff. Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag, Why Nothing Changes for Miss Ngo Thi Thanh, The Loop, What Saves Us, In the House of Immigrants, Temptation, Shelter, They Name Heaven, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, The Sky in Daduza Township, The Hand That Takes, This Man, In the Autumn Village, May, The Confusion of Planes We Must Wander in Sleep, The Biography of Fattys Bar and Grille, The Years Before Understanding, The Black Hose, Blues at the Equinox, The Impossible, and The Forms of Eleventh Avenue are reprinted from What Saves Us by Bruce Weigl.

Copyright 1992, reprinted by permission of TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Sitting with the Buddhist Monks, Hue, 1967, The One, What I Saw and Did in the Alley, Care, At the Confluence of Memory and Desire in Lorain, Ohio, Three Meditations at Nguyen Du, That Finished Feeling, Hymn of My Republic, Our 17th Street Years, Carp, Conversation of Our Blood, Three Fish, Our Middle Years, Elegy for Peter, My Early Training, Meditation at Melville Ave., Meditation at Hue, On the Ambiguity of Injury and Pain, Red Squirrel, Words Like Cold Whiskey Between Us and Pain, Bear Meadow, and Fever Dream in Hanoi are reprinted from Sweet Lorain. Copyright 1996, reprinted by permission of TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press. Poems from New Poems 19951998 originally appeared in the following publications, to whose editors grateful acknowledgment is made: And We Came Home in American Poetry Review, The Singing and the Dancing, Praise Wound Dirt Skin Sky, and The Inexplicable Abandonment of Habit in Eclipse in Kenyon Review, Elegy for Her Whose Name You Dont Know in Harvard Review, and Our Independence Day in The Progressive. Many of these poems originally appeared in the following publications: American Poetry Review, Antaeus, Black Warrior Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Field, Harpers, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, Ironwood, Kenyon Review, Manoa, Missouri Review, Mother Jones, New England Review, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Poetry New York, Poetry Now, Prairie Schooner, Quarry West, Quarterly West, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Tendril, TriQuarterly, The New York Times, Western Humanities Review, and Willow Springs. I have been blessed with the generous and loving support of my family and of my teachersStuart Friebert, Thomas Lux, Charles Simic, Dave Smith and David Youngand of my longtime editor and friend Reginald Gibbons.

I am grateful, too, for the support and patience of Morgan Entrekin, Ellen Levine, and Eric Price, without whom ARCHEOLOGY OF THE CIRCLE

Theres a man standing in a coop, his face is wet, he says hes too old: You cant give them away they just come back. I follow him to the cellar. Latin blessings on the wall, sauerkraut in barrels, he puts his arm around my waist begins to make a noise, pigeons bleeding. Were both crying now he moves his tongue around pulls feathers from his coat. A fantail he says, the kind that hop around, dont fly well. In Vietnam I was always afraid of mines: North Vietnamese mines, Vietcong mines, American mines, whole fields marked with warning signs.Next page