Couplet
Mang Thit River / February 2000 / for Michael
I would call the poem What I Did Not See. It would begin in the multiplied shade of the outdoor restaurant, the one we came to lost, and accidental, ten hours on the water, our interpreter already tired of the whole thing. The edge of the poem would be its bamboo fence, that and a hand-made roof, patched with plastic where it had to be, enlisted in the cause of something real: a sense of place, a sense of time, the body sweating in its plastic chair, holding out for a cold beer, or a slight rhyme. To write this I would need a photograph, to know the man wore a loose clean shirt, with a neat hem, and would, in the ordinary course of things, stand not quite to your shoulder. But you were big: he wasn’t small in his own world and he isn’t small in the poem, when he jumps up from his chair and charges you and you stand up to meet him, and the fact that he doesn’t hit you and you don’t hit him is just a fact: I didn’t see it. I had gone to piss on a clean slab of concrete by the river, or gone to keep my rendezvous with death’s fragmented angel, depending on the mode of reportage that you prefer, him blank behind the eyes and tethered by his right ankle in that hot place with flies beside the water. A sniper in the DNA, I’ve heard one poet call it; but I’m out of the business. When I see the planes in memory, I’m seeing footage, photographs: I wasn’t there. Images of images I could say, like calling the man right in front of you a ghost. He’s showing you the bullet in his arm and the fist he’s held for thirty years opening into a hand again, while this one shows me, back here in the flies and heat, cut off from the breeze of the river, this fine romantic mist, which I remember most things through. It’s a cloud of poison, a special-effect, I drop now through this sentence, so I can right here, precisely, say: what the planes sprayed, they sprayed so we could see. That’s what they said: they said so we could see. So this is simple, isn’t it? You there; me there; the shooter shot; the one not born yet, born.
Preface to Bone Pagoda, 2007
