Bridge Fight
                   Can Tho River, 1968/2000

 

Bow of our boat
In the weedy scene

Non-literate
Letter

Woman in the bushes
In the painting

In the bushes
Helicopter

Down in the river
Our boat

Down in the river

Figures of disputation, ‘we
Fought for the bridge for five weeks'

Everything till now was water,
Pre-

•

Painting of the battle
On the site of the battle

Flank attack by the language god
Bituminous bastard loves an allegory

Night breeze kicks up between your lines
Within

Illumination flare lights what it can
Beyond bright blackness

Mr. Chien with his hand on the rudder
Mr. Thuong with his thumb shot off

In stuttering etcetera

‘Maynard Smith drowned
A kid whose name I can't remember

Was killed by a recoilless
Another guy was killed by a recoilless

And then we took Ed's boat to Cua Viet
Where it hit a mine'

‘When there's trouble and we're beset'

Something happening
Something just going to happen

Two monks, one in saffron
One in tweed

•

So each fact    artifact

A blue mosquito net around our bed, or
A bull cart carrying weapons into town

It's just a glimpse: two men drawing fish nets
Over the side of a listing boat

A glimpse and then
It's over: wounded man in a wheelbarrow

Changing color of neon words
Spelled backwards on top of the river after dark

•

He said:

‘The burning of paper instead of children'
Homemade napalm    draft board lawn

That ‘some property has no right to exist'

Bundles of ash, the burned draft records
‘Trundled into court like infant coffins'

And she:

‘I was a peasant girl, I had never set foot'
In such head-on encounter

Fighting with what words contain
Or fighting in, as

‘Whose daughter is that skinny girl
Who rows a sampan so well?'

•

Proof text: ‘the Worst    is easy'
Against which we ‘grew by fact'

The skull fractured from within
Again and again by a single pellet

‘Like the shivering of a windowpane'
Or ‘a brain crossed with ribbons'

Every genre large and small
Every distortion adequate

•

‘Jim Lien and Jieter Warren
Got killed as part of that'

‘Les Murray
Got killed as part of that'

Boat aground and the bodies
On it, in it, it in them

Mr. Thuong
Got his thumb shot off

‘Got it'
As if he went there

For it

•

In a small vocabulary much
‘Occupied with shot'

Machete not the first cause
Of his nine fingers

Hack coconut for a living, or
Do not

Doctrines of Retrobation said
Post-war starvation said

‘Battle's horrid bowl'

Survivor is an artifact
– pinch-penny, catch-penny –

‘Man writing frightened by a word'

•

O peerless bridge
From what we see

‘Unto the scene
That we do not'

Word for pain
Not pain

‘Eradication of a finger'
Else, else

With leadmark watermark
Touched

Mr. Chien said the French would say
‘Cut open your stomach, I'll stuff it full

Of money'

 

 

 

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