Let your face express its own oblivion on dead tree trunks winter's bite will face soon at the edge of the Red river years of drought, hidden wounds, climatic changes. Tonight we make a big leap to end the war for good. It was a pretty simple life until I was cordially invited into the chaos of Vietnam. They know the children bend at work in fields but at night plant bombs along the roadsides. Soldiers move along the dykes, crickets sound like gunfire.
Life always comes to the way of death and other obfuscations.
The flashlight swung. The sudden stalling from the machine guns, engine voices, mutilated quietly as if a stone swirled under a cascade. In Tay Ninh, in '69, I see, in the rocket's red glare, the truth of it all laid bare as David takes his turn. We flew with our rifles, searching to bite into flesh. Back then the earth had gone mad, the heart vacant of people.