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I Ask My Father About Vietnam
He tells me about the boy
he passed on the dirt road of some nameless village,
on his way to a military hospital.
The boy was alone, walking in an unblinking daze.
His stomach had been blown open.
Someone must have helped him pull the hanging flap of skin,
stretching impossibly from his belly up
between his teeth so he could bite it,
and hold his intestines in.
He was alone and my father
rode past him in the back of a dusty truck,
toward the hospital that would repair his own burns
and send him home.
He stares straight ahead,
sitting at his potter’s wheel
and to avoid seeing him cry I stare at his hands,
fingers cracked from the clay
which draws all moisture out as he shapes it.
Sometimes his hands get worn down
where they rub the turning shape until they bleed,
and he keeps working,
blood mixing with the clay.
He leans over the wheel
studying the shape only he can see,
pressing the edges, carefully lifting up,
and I wonder what he is thinking
as he pushes the wetness into a form—
does he see in this spinning
a dirt road? A village?
A boy
with a halo of singed hair
who stumbles, alone,
arms held out from his burned sides
as he bites his own skin,
trying to keep himself from falling out
trying to keep himself in.
Return to Volume 2.2
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