My father died in the second war
arming a limpet mine--
startled the fish and was gone.
Now a sepia smile in a porcelain frame,
smudged by fingers kissed
and pressed against the glass,
"He would be proud,
he would be proud!"
. . . of the Saigon slut with canker sores
whose mewing cry as she arched her back
was no less plaintive than the child's,
my bullet in its chest--
or the reek of pissed-stained trousers,
pools of vomit
and the stench of wild-eyed men
who hold their entrails in their hands,
mouths stuffed with screams--
my own uttered over beer
in a Tokyo bar, casually
as smoke from a cigarette
lit off a burning bone shard.
He would be proud,
this brown ghost
whose deft hands erred once
in a task performed a thousand times
and felt the bright heat,
the steel wind,
the purifying flame--too late.
Ignoble saint,
proud ash.
ls--1983
Originally published in Eyeprayers, 1983