We'll finish off these Vietnam poems
and then I'll go to some others.
This is called The Detective.
I lie on my daughter's body to hold her in the Earth
but she won't stay.
She rises, lifting me with her as
if she were air, and not some remnant of failed re-education
in a Cambodian mass grave.
We rise till I wake.
I sit up, turn on the lamp and stare
at the photo of the girl who died yesterday,
at her Vietnamese mother and her American father.
Jewel van duc Thompson, murdered in Springfield, Ohio
in her 18th year, gone the day she
was born like in the cartoons when somebody rolls up
the road that stretches into the horizon
and the TV's screen goes black.
Go home, captain, the cop said yesterday as he gripped my hand
and hauled himself up from the ditch where they'd found her,
like Persephone climbing from the underworld one more time,
his eyes bright, the hunger for life and a good time
riding his back like a jockey.
Death is a vacation, I answered.
Then my hand was free and I could
see how she was thrown from the highway down the embankment.
Where are art and rationality when it counted?
I thought-- always around the corner
from somebody else's street.
Even the ice cream man never ever made your block,
though you could hear the bells, though you could feel the chill
like a shock those hot days, when your company beat
the bushes, when you bit into death's chocolate covered
center and froze...
I turn off the lamp and lie still in the dark.
Somewhere in time it is 1968.
I am bending over a wounded man with my knife.
My company calls me the angel of mercy.
I don't remember yesterday and there
is no tomorrow, there is only the moment the knife descends
from the equatorial dark,
only a step across the Cambodian border from Vietnam
to search and destroy the enemy.
But it is just a short time till the enemy discovers me
and I would die, but for the woman who takes me
to the border, who crosses with me from the underworld
back to the underworld.
I open the curtain.
Outside, the early morning is spinning, gathering speed
and moving down the street like a whirlwind.
I pull the curtain shut again and switch
on my tape of the murderer's confession,
hear the faint raspy voice playing and replaying itself.
It was Saturday night.
She stood alone at the bus stop.
When she took the first step toward my car,
I dropped the key once, twice.
She smiled, she picked it up.
I lie back on the bed while the voice wears itself out.
Yes, I think you live for a while, you get tired,
you walk the road into the interior, and never come back.
You disappear the way the woman and your child
disappear into Cambodia and the pink light of dawn,
early April 1975.
You say you'll go back, but you never do.
Springfield, Phnom Penh.
So many thousands of miles between a lie and the truth.
No, just a step.
The murderer's voice rises, become shrill.
Man, he says, is it wrong to do what is necessary?
I switch off the tape.
Each time I lie down I think I won't get up again.
I sing through the bed, the floor,
and out the other side of the Earth.
There my daughter denounces me.
She turns me back to the muddy border of forgiveness.
I get up, dress quickly, then open the curtain wide.
At the door I put my hand on the knob,
hesitate, then step out into sunlight.
I get into the car, lift the key to the ignition, drop it.
My hand is shaking.
I look into the back seat.
The 20th century is there, wearing
a necklace of grenades that glitters
against this black skin.
I stare, see the pins have all been pulled.
Drive, says the voice.
I turn to the wheel, imagine the explosions,
house after house disintegrating in flames, but all is silent.
People go on with their lives on this day that is 100 years long
on this sad, red balloon of a planet,
the air escaping from it like the hot, sour breath
of a child.
[APPLAUSE]