Komunyakaa - Dien Cai Dau

DIEN CAI DAU Also by Yusef KomunyakaaDedications & Other Darkhorses
Lost in the Bonewheel Factory
Copacetic
I Apologize for the Eyes in My Head
Toys in a Field
February in Sydney
Magic City
Neon Vernacular
Thieves of Paradise
Blue Notes
Talking Dirty to the Gods
Pleasure Dome

Yusef Komunyakaa Published by Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, CT 06459
www.wesleyan.edu/wespress Copyright 1988 by Yusef Komunyakaa
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
15 14 13 12 11 WESLEYAN POETRY
First printing, 1988 Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following publications in which these poems first appeared: Alcatraz, The American Voice, AWP Newsletter, Caliban, Callaloo, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, The Louisiana Weekly, MSS, New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, The North American Review, Ploughshares, Shankpainter, Writers Forum. Some of these poems also appeared in a limited edition chapbook, Toys in a Field (Black River Press, 1986). Acknowledgment is also made to the following anthologies: The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets: Somewhere Near Phu Bai, Starlight Scope Myopia; Carrying the Darkness: After the Fall, The Dead at Quang Tri, A Break from the Bush, Boat People, Somewhere Near Phu Bai; The Made Thing: We Never Know, Saigon Bar Girls, 1975, Facing It. I wish to thank the Louisiana Arts Commission for a fellowship that enabled me to complete this book. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Komunyakaa, Yusef.
Dien Cai Dau. 1.

Vietnamese Conflict, 19611975Poetry. I. Title.
PS3561.0455D5 1988 811.54 88-5761
ISBN 0-8195-2163-9
ISBN 0-8195-1164-1 (pbk.) for my brother Glenn
who saw The Nam before I did

DIEN CAI DAU We tied branches to our helmets. We painted our faces & rifles with mud from a riverbank, blades of grass hung from the pockets of our tiger suits. We wove ourselves into the terrain, content to be a hummingbirds target. We hugged bamboo & leaned against a breeze off the river, slow-dragging with ghosts from Saigon to Bangkok, with women left in doorways reaching in from America.

We aimed at dark-hearted songbirds. In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal, till something almost broke inside us. VC struggled with the hillside, like black silk wrestling iron through grass. We werent there.

The river ran through our bones. Small animals took refuge against our bodies; we held our breath, ready to spring the L-shaped ambush, as a world revolved under each mans eyelid.

Crawling down headfirst into the hole, he kicks the air & disappears. I feel like Im down there with him, moving ahead, pushed by a river of darkness, feeling blessed for each inch of the unknown. Our tunnel rat is the smallest man in the platoon, in an echo chamber that makes his ears bleed when he pulls the trigger. He moves as if trying to outdo blind fish easing toward imagined blue, pulled by something greater than lifes ambitions.

He cant think about spiders & scorpions mending the air, or care about bats upside down like gods in the moles blackness. The damp smell goes deeper than the stench of honey buckets. A web of booby traps waits, ready to spring into broken stars. Forced onward by some need, some urge, he knows the pulse of mysteries & diversions like thoughts trapped in the ground. He questions each root. Every cornered shadow has a life to bargain with.

Like an angel pushed up against what hurts, his globe-shaped helmet follows the gold ring his flashlight casts into the void. Through silver lice, shit, maggots, & vapor of pestilence, he goes, the good soldier, on hands & knees, tunneling past death sacked into a blind corner, loving the weight of the shotgun that will someday dig his grave.

The moon cuts through night trees like a circular saw white hot. In the guard shack I lean on the sandbags, taking aim at whatever. Hundreds of blue-steel stars cut a path, fanning out silver for a second. If anyones there, dont blame me.

I count the shapes ten meters out front, over & over, making sure theyre always there. I dont dare blink an eye. The white-painted backs of the Claymore mines like quarter-moons. They say Victor Charlie will paint the other sides & turn the blast toward you. If I hear a noise will I push the button & blow myself away? The moon grazes treetops. I count the Claymores again.

Thinking about buckshot kneaded in the plastic C-4 of the brain, counting sheep before I know it.

Gray-blue shadows lift shadows onto an oxcart. Making night work for us, the starlight scope brings men into killing range. The river under Vi Bridge takes the heart away like the Water God riding his dragon. Smoke-colored Viet Cong move under our eyelids, lords over loneliness winding like coral vine through sandalwood & lotus, inside our lowered heads years after this scene ends. The brain closes down.

What looks like one step into the trees, theyre lifting crates of ammo & sacks of rice, swaying under their shared weight. Caught in the infrared, what are they saying? Are they talking about women or calling the Americans beaucoup dien cai dau? One of them is laughing. You want to place a finger to his lips & say shhhh. You try reading ghost talk on their lips. They say up-up we go, lifting as one. This one, old, bowlegged, you feel you could reach out & take him into your arms.

You peer down the sights of your M-16, seeing the full moon loaded on an oxcart.

Our eyes on the hill, we have to get there somehow. Three snipers sing out like hornets. The red pawns our last move green & yellow squares backdropped with mangrove swamps, something to hold to. Hand over hand, we follow invisible rope to nowhere, duck-walking through grass & nosing across the line of no return. Remnants of two thatch huts tremble to heavy, running feet.

We make it to the hill, fall down & slide rounds into the mortar tube, & smithereens of leaf debris cover the snipers. Unscathed, with arms hooked through each others like men on some wild midnight-bound carousal, in our joy, we kick & smash the pagoda till its dried blood covering the ground.

When we stop, a green snake starts again through deep branches. Spiders mend webs we marched into. Monkeys jabber in flame trees, dancing on the limbs to make fire-colored petals fall. Torch birds burn through the dark-green day.

The lieutenant puts on sunglasses & points to an X circled on his map. When will we learn to move like trees move? The point man raises his hand Wait! Weve just crossed paths with VC, branches left quivering. The lieutenants right hand says what to do. We walk into a clearing that blinds. We move like a platoon of silhouettes balancing sledge hammers on our heads, unaware our shadows have untied from us, wandered off & gotten lost.

This is harder than counting stones along paths going nowhere, the way a tiger circles & backtracks by smelling his blood on the ground.

The one kneeling beside the pagoda, remember him? Captain, we wont talk about that. The Buddhist boy at the gate with the shaven head we rubbed for luck glides by like a white moon. He wont stay dead, dammit! Blades aim for the family jewels; the grass we walk on wont stay down.

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