The Thorn Merchant’s Son 107
I Apologize 108
1984 109
Dreambook Bestiary 113
Jonestown: More Eyes for Jadwiga’s Dream 115
Landscape for the Disappeared 116
Good Joe 118
In the Background of Silence 120
For the Walking Dead 121
Child’s Play 122
The Beast & Burden: Seven Improvisations 123
Ambush 129
Monsoon Season 130
Water Buffalo 131
Le Xuan, Beautiful Spring 132
Please 133
Camouflaging the Chimera 137
Tunnels 138
Starlight Scope Myopia 139
Hanoi Hannah 141
“You and I Are Disappearing” 142
Re-creating the Scene 143
We Never Know 145
A Break from the Bush 146
Tu Do Street 147
Communiqué 148
Prisoners 150
Jungle Surrender 152
Thanks 154
To Have Danced with Death 155
Report from the Skull’s Diorama 156
Boat People 157
Missing in Action 158
Facing It 159
The Plea 163
The Man Who Carries the Desert Around Inside Himself: For Wally 165
Rocks Push 167
When Loneliness Is A Man 169
A Quality of Light 170
Gerry’s Jazz 171
Boxing Day 173
Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage 175
Blue Light Lounge Sutra for the Performance Poets at Harold Park Hotel 176
February in Sydney 178
Fog Galleon
Horse-headed clouds, flags
& pennants tied to black
Smokestacks in swamp mist.
From the quick green calm
Some nocturnal bird calls
Ship ahoy, ship ahoy!
I press against the taxicab
Window. I’m back here, interfaced
With a dead phosphorescence;
The whole town smells
Like the world’s oldest anger.
Scabrous residue hunkers down under
Sulfur & dioxide, waiting
For sunrise, like cargo
On a phantom ship outside Gaul.
Cool glass against my cheek
Pulls me from the black schooner
On a timeless sea—everything
Dwarfed beneath the papermill
Lights blinking behind the cloudy
Commerce of wheels, of chemicals
That turn workers into pulp
When they fall into vats
Of steamy serenity.
At the Screen Door
Just before sunlight
Burns off morning fog.
Is it her, will she know
What I’ve seen & done,
How my boots leave little grave-stone
Shapes in the wet dirt,
That I’m no longer light
On my feet, there’s a rock
In my belly? It weighs
As much as the story
Paul told me, moving ahead
Like it knows my heart.
Is this the same story
That sent him to a padded cell?
After all the men he’d killed in Korea
& on his first tour in Vietnam,
Someone tracked him down.
The Spec 4 he ordered
Into a tunnel in Cu Chi
Now waited for him behind
The screen door, a sunset
In his eyes, a dead man
Wearing his teenage son’s face.
The scream that leaped
Out of Paul’s mouth
Wasn’t his, not this decorated
Hero. The figure standing there
Wasn’t his son. Who is it
Waiting for me, a tall shadow
Unlit in the doorway, no more
Than an outline of the past?
I drop the duffle bag
& run before I know it,
Running toward her, the only one
I couldn’t have surprised,
Who’d be here at daybreak
Watching a new day stumble
Through a whiplash of grass
Like a man drunk on the rage
Of being alive.
Moonshine
Drunken laughter escapes
Behind the fence woven
With honeysuckle, up to where
I stand. Daddy’s running-buddy,
Carson, is beside