(I)


I was going to Hô Chí Minh City.
The lady who took me to the boat had that shiny scar all around her neck.  The war had lured her 
to the fields to collect phosphorus metal, digging with rough hewn bamboo sticks, when
Kamblam!  That's when it was still Saigon, and the soldiers had said everything would be 
all right.
Her mother was a mortar casualty, they say, so she found her living from the ground
where nothing grew any longer.
The river was fat and shiny.  Rafts of weed floated on its surface taking the thoughts of those 
departed, and those too afraid to go on.  I was riding those rafts three years ago
as the woman with the shiny scar packed the blocks of frozen fish and sent them down
to the place she lost her face.  They say she lived to the edge of the life, then chose a nest
on her newly formed body.  She is not the same as the seven year old she was
Cãc of the older ones told me.  She has left and returned in one body.
Something makes her change . . .
That something is in me too.

My mother said the change had to come to our country, but I do not understand her.
She and my father did not plan to have me so soon, and I asked her about myself
and where he wanted to leave to, but it never makes sense.  I ask the winds a lot to blow me their 
wisdom.  You will wish you didn't ask, they blow with their monsoon rains.  
I am sure they have told my ears this warning.  I will listen when I am strong,
and in the woods of my years.  Your time is coming
the ruffled breezes say, as I hug the woman who wasn't allowed to die
and leave her earthly body gone.

It is very gook.  I think about that work, breaking back in a hot wet field,
browning tan to be sun waking the muddy rice earth.  I am
the gook they wanted to kill.  Why?  My father never tried to explain.
American music talked bad about some people; they used the bad words themselves,
then thoughts came they used it to heal.  So I sought healing too.
I have terrible scars hiding
I try so hard to find.

We knew we had the same thing between us.  She had to wear her Gook outside so
I could see it in.  We always know without knowing her, so we turn our heads aside.
We are the very people she came to leave.
We waved.
The boat glided slowly out the other bank, then turned.
We waved again, my old life got smaller.
"Lê Phât Dàn !"
I thought I heard her say.

I was younger, and more impressional, Tém said about me.  I was not wanted in the city with too 
many people already, so I had to make it like me.  I worked at animal houses by day and used to 
eat with the cyclomen at night.  They would tell great stories of all the people they had carried, 
and all the nearly death accidents they had seen.  One, who had a daughter named for my favorite 
flower, would give me his cycle by night.  I'd fight the black for passengers to carry, and lay 
sprawled in empty driveways, exhausted by my efforts.  In the morning he'd ask how I'd done, 
and weary-eyed, I'd tell him in a few crumpled notes.  'He'll get better.'  the man would tell his 
friends.  'I can see one fortune smiles on.'  and they'd laugh.  
    'He is a poor boy from the river province.  He will never have the legs to work all day long!'  
and they'd pinch my aching limbs, and punch my shoulders.  'He will have ghosts for men to ride.'  
My friend would shake his head and laugh with them.  
    'Perhaps.'  he always said.

It was one great day I took the Americans to the war crimes museum.  They gave me fifty US 
dollars when they came out.  'Take me to the nearest bar,' one man, with little white hairs peering 
from his beard said.  'We must take rest.'  He wanted to shed some tears.  I was shocked to hear 
the white skin talk in my tongue, broken as it was with years of inure.  
    'Have you been in that place before?'  he asked me, when I had sweat to move their weight. 
    'No.'  I replied.  'It is for the others.'  
    'I want you to go there.'  he said.  
Here, my life changed.
When I showed my friend the green note, he eyed it thought-fully.
    'You must do as the man has said.  When you are finished, I will give you the other half of this.' 
And there he tore my beautiful prize apart.  'You are as this piece of terrible paper.  Remember 
that as I give you a reason to dawdle where most men flee.'
When I finished, he asked my voice what it says about the museum.
When my voice had finished, he asked my heart.
My heart had to speak through my voice.  He waved his half of the bill, and put it straight in his 
mouth.  'You are speaking this.' he said, with an exaggerated thrust of his tongue.
I did not understand it.
That night, he took his cyclo and told me, 'You will look through the daylight to see
what they poise as stillness for night.'  I bowed and turned.
He punched my shoulder, and tore his half in half.
'See with night in your heart.'
    'Is this me?'  I likened myself to half of the half.
    'Always, and negative.'

He was an old man.  For thirty years he had pedaled Saigon's streets.
I had no business to question his authority with things he's always understood.
    'I was bottle and liquid when I was no longer spirit.  Nobody poured me from myself
when I arrived upon this earth.'  
He told me this in confidence.  His friends would have laughter for such strange talk.  
'Have you been back to see the sense in war?'  He would incur a malignant grin to ask me 
another nonsense question.  'Have you listened with your ears, or your trigger fingers?'  
He knows I have never shot a gun.  'Oh, but you have.'  he would say to my silent thoughts. 
'Go listen harder.'



On March 08, 1965 the first unit of US expeditionary force landed in Da Nang.
I was told to look for the unlookable on this day, some thirty years later.  Seven days after, 
I bore witness to the last of my friend's talks.
    'Tomorrow you will understand me.'
It seemed improbable.
'Tomorrow you will feel the waves of future turn past.'  He choked a smile back, and ditched the 
scraps of bill to the winds.  'Follow them.'
I did.  I read their movements as you'd expect wind to ruffle a lake
as you'd see it move trees' distance.  I ran after their jaunts, catching each in a fist
designed for its use.
'You have no further need for my cyclo.'
I protested.
'Check your palms.'
I opened each fist.
'Behold, your destiny.'
I closed them distantly, as the wind rallied its forces.

The next day I learned many things.  My Lai  had been laid to waste twenty seven years ago.
I was that age.  I was of theatre, they called war.  I was bombs' ordinance, sizing opportunity to 
shatter lifelong dreams.  I walked the long, hot pavement to the war tribunal and watched heat 
glisten off the used, rusty vehicles.
He was there.
At first, he didn't recognize me.

Later that day, I was reborn.

At the muzzle of a black man's rage, I looked at my final moments on Earth
as the lifelong village I'd tended went up
in a shattered scream of anguish.
He pushed the lot of us over the white line between us,
barked  'Hold still!'  as the man parted his worst with the pause,
as a shutter winked eternity
as I moved closer to my wife and child, that beautiful fragile girl who
took their bullets first.  I crawled mercy to the gods who brought this calamity
feeling hot thuds of burning metal enter
my last Earthly tears.
The Americans extinguished 500 lives that day.
Spirits leapt to their hereafter.  I watched them go.
    'You were there.'
	'I know.'
He shook that instant recollection time
was powerless to avoid.





His gun assailed me of my path Karma  was powerless to instill.
I went back.  They forced me to.
Cãc came to my delirium, shook me awake, and spoke the heart my voice counted still.
	'We of you and I have come to see our destinies.'
	'What?'
The man was saying to me.
'You were there?!'
He wept openly.
US soldiers pose before torn up bodies of their Vietnamese victims.
US soldiers dragging a suspected informant's body behind a tank as torture.
US soldiers arresting and molesting women.
US soldiers at the Binh Duong massacre.

Here was the man who gave me the fifty US dollars.
	'I haave something for you.'  I stammered.
I opened his hand.  I closed it into a fist.  He opened it and looked.
I smiled.
'Not necessary.'

I went back there three more times
and then I bought my cyclo.


Son My--"Destroy all mobile targets." Help!  Humans move, until they're dead.
I listened to the humans wail through my beer of celebration.  A man displays a shredded Viet 
Cong after a successful grenade attack.  White phosphore citizen with blanched face and 
jelly eyes stares back at the blind and deaf camera.  Man who wouldn't rat on his 
countrymen is caged in oxen dung on Con Dao Islands.  There are dog cages, pig cages, 
tiger cages and ovens, so small and hot prisoners gasp in turn at the steel bars
too narrow to show a face twice in three infernal hours.  The Englishman wept with the 
American as if they were in looking out.  Their chests were scarred with the red hot stovepipe 
they were gunpointed to embrace.  'Congratulations!'  they sang in my ear.  I'd been had 
suddenly accepted me into their ranks.  'Where is my friend?' 
'He is gone.'  through the fog of empty gallon jugs.
Electric phones crank pain to genitalia ropes tightened to burst.  Snakes slink up female 
trousers searching for rejuvenation from age-old hypocrisy.  Anti-personnel mines 
indiscriminately blow off loved ones arms.  'What will they have you do?'
The night sang loudly in my ears.








That night I dreamt of the last words Hoangle Kha  never spoke,
as the famous roving French guillotine struck its fifty kilogram blade on a tongue twitching without 
its heart.  1960 was the year the Americans first arrived, though they'll tell the articles differently.
My friend used to tell me so.  He said his mother made her love with the general, who paid her a 
hundred US dollars when he left, his suitcase stuffed with heroin
she got him-
all secret to his men who watched us.
In the morning, I raised a throbbed head from a torrential sleep, went to the temple and bought a 
bird.  I burned incense, and tied a tiny prayer to its little leg-
set it go free.


Binh Duong Massacre bodies lined the roads with tumbled arms and legs all wrapped
in