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With Song of Napalm, Bruce Weigl established himself as a poet of incomparable power and lyric fury, whose work stands as an elegy to the countless lives dramatically altered by war. Archeology of the Circle brings together the major work of this major American poet.
Collected here for the first time—from eight volumes of poetry spanning two decades—Archeology of the Circle charts Weigl’s literary arc toward a hard-bitten and sensuous lyric. Out of the horror of individual experience, he has fashioned poetry that offers solace to the disillusioned and bears transcendent resonance for all of us. Archeology of the Circle illustrates Bruce Weigl’s remarkable creative achievements and signifies his own personal salvation through his writing.
“Few poets of any generation have written so searingly into of the trauma of war, inscribing its wound while refusing the fragile suture of redemption. Here is the haunted utterance of diasporic selfhood, a poetry of aftermath and consequence, an answer to the call for an ethos of infinite obligation. In this, and in the breadth of his accomplishment, Bruce Weigl is one of the most important poets of our time.” —Carolyn Forch, author of The Country Between Us
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780802195197 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 11/20/2018 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 240 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
from EXECUTIONER (1976)
PIGEONS
There's a man standing in a coop,
his face is wet,
he says he's too old:
"You can't give them away they just come back."
I follow him to the cellar.
Latin blessings on the wall,
sauerkraut in barrels,
he puts his arm around my waist begins to make a noise,
pigeons bleeding.
We're both crying now he moves his tongue around pulls feathers from his coat.
A fantail he says,
the kind that hop around,
don't fly well.
MINES
1
In Vietnam I was always afraid of mines:
North Vietnamese mines, Vietcong mines,
American mines,
whole fields marked with warning signs.
A bouncing betty comes up waist high–
cuts you in half.
One man's legs were laid alongside him in the Dustoff:
he asked for a chairback, morphine.
He screamed he wanted to give his eyes away, his kidneys,
his heart ...
2
You're taught to walk at night. Slowly, lift one leg,
clear the sides with your arms, clear the back,
front, put the leg down, like swimming.
MONKEY
1
I am you are he she it is they are you are we are.
I am you are he she it is they are you are we are.
When they ask for your number pretend to be breathing.
Forget the stinking jungle,
force your fingers between the lines.
Learn to get out of the dew.
The snakes are thirsty.
Bladders, water, boil it, drink it.
Get out of your clothes:
You can't move in your green clothes.
Your O.D. in color issue clothes.
Get out the damp between your legs.
Get out the plates and those who ate.
Those who spent the night.
Those small Vietnamese soldiers.
They love to hold your hand.
A fine man is good to hard.
Back away from their dark cheeks.
Small Vietnamese soldiers.
They love to love you.
I have no idea how it happened,
I remember nothing but light.
2
I don't remember the hard swallow of the lover.
I don't remember the burial of ears.
I don't remember the time of the explosion.
This is the place curses are manufactured: delivered like white tablets.
The survivor is spilling his bed pan.
He slips one in your pocket,
you're finally satisfied.
I don't remember the heat in the hands,
the heat around the neck.
Good times bad times sleep get up work. Sleep get up good times bad times.
Work eat sleep good bad work times.
I like a certain cartoon of wounds.
The water which refuses to dry.
I like a little unaccustomed mercy.
Pulling the trigger is all we have.
I hear a child.
3
I dropped to the bottom of a well.
I have a knife.
I cut someone with it.
Oh, I have the petrified eyebrows of my Vietnam monkey.
My monkey from Vietnam.
My monkey.
Put your hand here.
It makes no sense.
I beat the monkey with a sword.
I didn't know him.
He was bloody.
He lowered his intestines to my shoes. My shoes spit-shined the moment I learned to tie the bow.
I'm not on speaking terms with anyone. In the wrong climate a person can spoil,
the way a pair of boots slows you down ...
I don't know when I'm sleeping.
I don't know if what I'm saying is anything at all.
I'll lay on my monkey bones.
4
I'm tired of the rice falling in slow motion like eggs from the smallest animal.
I'm twenty-five years old,
quiet, tired of the same mistakes,
the same greed, the same past.
The same past with its bleat and pound of the dead,
with its hand grenade tossed into a hooch on a dull Sunday because when a man dies like that his eyes sparkle,
his nose fills with witless nuance because a farmer in Bong Son has dead cows lolling in a field of claymores because the vc tie hooks to their comrades because a spot of blood is a number because a woman is lifting her dress across the big pond ...
If we're soldiers we should smoke them if we have them. Someone's bound to point us in the right direction sooner or later.
I'm tired and I'm glad you asked.
5
There is a hill.
Men run top hill.
Men take hill.
Give hill to man.
* * *
Me and my monkey and me and my monkey my Vietnamese monkey my little brown monkey came with me to Guam and Hawaii in Ohio he saw my people he jumped on my daddy he slipped into mother he baptized my sister he's my little brown monkey he came here from heaven to give me his spirit imagine my monkey my beautiful monkey he saved me lifted me above the punji sticks above the mines above the ground burning above the dead above the living above the wounded dying the wounded dying above my own body until I am me.
* * *
Men take hill away from smaller men.
Men take hill and give to fatter man.
Men take hill. Hill has number.
Men run up hill. Run down hill.
SHORT
There's a bar girl on Trung Hung Do who has half a ten piaster note I tore in my drunken relief to be leaving the country. She has half and I have half, if I can find it. If I lost it, it wasn't on purpose, it's all I have to remember her. She has a wet sheet, a PX fan, PX radio and half a ten piaster note, as if she cared to remember me. She thought it was stupid to tear money and when I handed it to her she turned to another soldier, new in country, who needed a girl. I hope I burn in hell.
ANNA GRASA
I came home from Vietnam.
My father had a sign made at the foundry:
WELCOME HOME BRUCE in orange glow paint.
He rented spotlights,
I had to squint.
WELCOME HOME BRUCE.
Out of the car I moved up on the sign dreaming myself full. The sign that cut the sky.
My eyes burned.
But behind the terrible thing I saw my grandmother,
beautiful Anna Grasa.
I couldn't tell her tell her.
I clapped to myself,
clapped to the sound of her dress.
I could've put it on she held me so close,
both of us could be inside.
from A SACK FULL OF OLD QUARRELS (1977)
SAILING TO BIEN HOA
In my dream of the hydroplane I'm sailing to Bien Hoa. The shrapnel in my thighs like tiny glaciers. I remember a flower, a kite, a mannikin playing the guitar, a yellow fish eating a bird, a truck floating in urine, a rat carrying a banjo, a fool counting the cards, a monkey praying, a procession of whales and far off, two children eating rice, speaking French. I'm sure of the children, their damp flute, the long line of their vowels.
THE DEER HUNTER
for Jack Flowers
In late September he starts to feel excited so he hunts squirrels.
Some days are so warm the ones shot in the morning smell bad by the time you leave the field.
It's good practice
"you have to stand downwind,
be quiet and watch the trees."
He can find a squirrel.
He can flip his fingernail on the butt of his gun make a noise like two or three fox squirrels cutting on hickories
"and deer are just like squirrels you just wait and when a buck walks by you shoot him ..."
CONVOY
On a convoy from Bong Son to Hue we stop at a Vietnamese graveyard. People set up shelter halves right over the top of gravestones: one rock wall just in case. It's raining. I smell people.
Two in the morning someone wakes me for guard. I'm out of bed, standing in the cold. The man next to me walks over to talk. A helicopter is parked thirty yards in front of us and in the moon it begins to move. My friend becomes leader, he wants to fire, I'm afraid of an explosion. He tells me to circle the ship while he covers.
At the window it's dark, no moon. Inside the pilot, restlessly turning in his sleep, rocking his ship.
HIM, ON THE BICYCLE
"There was no light; there was no light at all ..."
In a liftship near Hue the door gunner is in a trance.
He's that driver who falls asleep at the wheel between Pittsburgh and Cleveland staring at the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Flares fall,
where the river leaps I go stiff I have to think, tropical.
The door gunner sees movement,
the pilot makes small circles:
four men running carrying rifles,
one man on a bicycle in the middle of the jungle.
He pulls me out of the ship there's firing far away.
I'm on the back of the bike holding his hips.
It's hard pumping for two,
I hop off the bike.
I'm brushing past trees,
the man on the bike stops pumping,
lifts his feet,
we don't waste a stroke.
His hat flies off,
I catch it behind my back,
put it one. I want to live forever.
Like a blaze streaming down the trail.
from A ROMANCE (1979)
A ROMANCE
The skinny red-haired girl gets up from the bar and dances over to the jukebox and punches the buttons as if she were playing the piano–
below the white points of her pelvis an enormous belt buckle shaped like the head of a snake with two red rhinestone eyes which she polishes with the heels of her hands making circles on her own fine thighs and looking up she catches me staring, my lust like a flag waving at her across the room as her big mean boyfriend runs hillbilly after hillbilly off the table in paycheck nine-ball games.
It is always like this with me in bars,
wanting women I know I'll have to get my face punched bloody to love.
Or she could be alone,
and I could be dull enough from liquor to imagine my face interesting enough to take her into conversation while I count my money hoping to jesus I have enough to get us both romantic.
I don't sleep anyway so 1 go to bars and tell my giant lies to women who have heard them from me,
from the thousands of me out on the town with our impossible strategies for no good reason but our selves,
who are holy.
ON THIS SPOT
This is where the old woman lifted her dress, pulled down her stiff underwear and pissed in the alley. I was standing in the dark cooling my heels. She didn't see me as she came through the door, squatted next to the bar owner's white El Dorado. I'm glad she didn't see me. I'm glad I watched her piss so hard her eyes closed. When she finished and wiped herself with the handkerchief and pulled the dress down around her thick ankles, I almost called to her.
CARDINAL
She is more beautiful than all her red husbands,
more indifferent toward the dry seeds on the window.
You don't notice by her color though the gray is perfect gray,
nor by her song though it cuts through you,
not even by the way she flits upward branch to branch,
female shape ascending inside the shuddering tree–
it's her head, the way she tilts it side to side,
pure movement, lifting when the wind catches her small belly as she leans but doesn't let go.
THE MAN WHO MADE ME LOVE HIM
All I know about this man is that he played the trumpet from his bedroom window.
Evenings we could hear him trying to play something while we laughed at the din and called him names.
I want to sing about this but all I know is that it was near dark so I missed the way home and stopped to rest in the churchyard where gold carp lolled in the holy pond.
I was seven and the man who played the trumpet took me to the roundhouse where he said the hobos slept,
and though I knew the tracks and the woods surrounding them,
I didn't know that secret.
He made me take him into my mouth,
my face rose and fell with his hips and the sun cut through boxcars waiting to be emptied.
THE LIFE BEFORE FEAR
When Acey O'Neil smacked his brother Herbert on the side of his head with a two-by-four I thought Herbert would die,
but he didn't even bleed,
he just lay there, dulled out some and shook as though whipped with joy.
And then he got up.
He let us feel the lump on his head not so much out of goodness,
as out of a need to be touched.
After we each had a turn Herbert raised his face and wandered off stiffly like a man who hears his name called across a great distance.
DOGS
I bought a bar girl in Saigon cigarettes, watches, and Tide soap to sell on the black market and she gave me a room to sleep in and all the cocaine I could live through those nights I had to leave.
I would sometimes meet them, on the stairs,
and she would be wrapped in the soldier who was always drunk, smiling,
her smell all over him.
She ran once to the room screaming about dogs and pulled me down to the street where a crowd of Vietnamese gathered watching two stuck.
The owners fought about whose fault it was.
The owner of the male took off his sandal,
began to beat the female;
the owner of the female kicked the male but they did not part,
the beating made her tighten and her tightening made him swell as she dragged him down the street the crowd running after them.
I remembered my grandfather,
how his pit bull locked up the same way with the neighbor's dog.
The neighbor screamed and kicked and the cop with his nightstick sucked his teeth and circled the dogs as the dogs circled.
Yet my grandfather knew what to do–
not cold water, warm,
warm and pour it slow.
I HAVE HAD MY TIME RISING AND SINGING
When I was two I crawled out onto the ruined landing in the red apartment building next to the Catholic church where I would grow up mean and steal quarters from the holy pond.
I was a late walker and at two I still hugged the floor as the dizzy man hugs the ground after spinning too long in a dance.
At the time I'm sure it was fear but now I'm grown and say it was more that I wanted to know the ground before I gave it up,
and besides, I was a fast crawler and could tear across the room before my sister who walked early, who ran when I was born.
I don't remember why I was on the landing,
why I crawled away from my mother.
I don't even remember the fall–
but the hanging on as I fell my fingernails filling with splinters,
and I remember the doctor,
and the two nurses, and my father holding me down as they pulled the splinters out,
and I imagine my screaming,
how it must have come on its own,
how it must have lasted until we were all pale, all sobbing until I was lifted to the back seat of my father's car my head cradled in my mother's hands until sleep lulled me from the pain to the memory of pain.
This, I think, is what is wrong with me.
I think this is why I run down stairs as if to outrun the falling I'm certain is near,
as if to outlive the darkness I know I must have seen,
as if to survive, as I once did,
on one more span of stairs,
beautifully disguised to myself as a child.
PAINTING ON A T'ANG DYNASTY WATER VESSEL
Small girl leading a horse its heavy lathered thighs steaming upward dwarfing her at awkward angles she is stopped as if by some urgent recollection,
bundle of white flowers in her free hand.
Beyond her the moon before the willows the boat of drunken fishermen and mountains,
green peaks on the neck,
on the farthest peak two men trying to say good-bye,
one with a gift of thanks the other gazing down the path to his house lit by a single lamp and his wife kneeling by the cooking and his daughter leading a horse its ... no, I've come around,
this thing has turned completely around in my hands.
Someone must have meant this,
they painted it so when you picked it up hundreds of years later you'd find the girl waiting for her father on the mountains past the loud willows in the moon.
THE HARP
When he was my age and I was already a boy my father made a machine in the garage.
A wired piece of steel with many small and beautiful welds ground so smooth they resembled rows of pearls.
He went broke with whatever it was.
He held it so carefully in his arms.
He carried it foundry to foundry.
I think it was his harp,
I think it was what he longed to make with his hands for the world.
He moved it finally from the locked closet to the bedroom to the garage again where he hung it on the wall until I climbed and pulled it down and rubbed it clean and tried to make it work.
from THE MONKEY WARS (1985)
AMNESIA
If there was a world more disturbing than this Where black clouds bowed down and swallowed you whole And overgrown tropical plants Rotted, effervescent in the muggy twilight and monkeys Screamed something That came to sound like words to each other Across the triple-canopy jungle you shared,
You don't remember it.
You tell yourself no and cry a thousand days.
You imagine the crows calling autumn into place Are your brothers and you could If only the strength and will were there Fly up to them to be black And useful to the wind.
GIRL AT THE CHU LAI LAUNDRY
All this time I had forgotten.
My miserable platoon was moving out One day in the war and I had my clothes in the laundry.
I ran the two dirt miles,
Convoy already forming behind me. I hit The block of small hooches and saw her Twist out the black rope of her hair in the sun.
She did not look up at me,
Not even when I called to her for my clothes.
She said I couldn't have them,
They were wet ...
Who would've thought the world stops Turning in the war, the tropical heat like hate And your platoon moves out without you,
Your wet clothes piled At the feet of the girl at the laundry,
Beautiful with her facts.
Excerpted from "Archeology of the Circle"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Bruce Weigl.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
from Executioner (1976),
Pigeons,
Mines,
Monkey,
Short,
Anna Grasa,
from A Sack Full of Old Quarrels (1977),
Sailing to Bien Hoa,
The Deer Hunter,
Convoy,
Him, on the Bicycle,
from A Romance (1979),
A Romance,
On This Spot,
Cardinal,
The Man Who Made Me Love Him,
The Life Before Fear,
Dogs,
I Have Had My Time Rising and Singing,
Painting on a T'ang Dynasty Water Vessel,
The Harp,
from The Monkey Wars (1985),
Amnesia,
Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry,
Burning Shit at An Khe,
1955,
Song for the Lost Private,
Killing Chickens,
The Last Lie,
Temple Near Quang Tri, Not on the Map,
Surrounding Blues on the Way Down,
Elegy for A.,
Noise,
Regret for the Mourning Doves Who Failed to Mate,
Mercy,
Small Song for Andrew,
The Streets,
Snowy Egret,
Song of Napalm,
from Song of Napalm (1988),
Introduction (by Robert Stone),
The Way of Tet,
Some Thoughts on the Ambassador: Bong Son, 1967,
LZ Nowhere,
Breakdown,
On the Anniversary of Her Grace,
Apparition of the Exile,
The Soldier's Brief Epistle,
Dialectical Materialism,
The Kiss,
Elegy,
from What Saves Us (1992),
Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag,
Why Nothing Changes for Miss Ngo Thi Thanh,
The Loop,
What Saves Us,
In the House of Immigrants,
Temptation,
Shelter,
They Name Heaven,
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,
The Sky in Daduza Township,
The Hand That Takes,
This Man,
In the Autumn Village,
May,
The Confusion of Planes We Must Wander in Sleep,
The Biography of Fatty's Bar and Grille,
The Years Without Understanding,
The Black Hose,
Blues at the Equinox,
The Impossible,
The Forms of Eleventh Avenue,
from Sweet Lorain (1996),
Sitting with the Buddhist Monks, Hue, 1967,
The One,
What I Saw and Did in the Alley,
Care,
At the Confluence of Memory and Desire in Lorain, Ohio,
Three Meditations at Nguyen Du,
That Finished Feeling,
Hymn of My Republic,
Our 17th Street Years,
Carp,
Conversation of Our Blood,
Three Fish,
Our Middle Years,
Elegy for Peter,
My Early Training,
Meditation at Melville Ave.,
Meditation at Hue,
On the Ambiguity of Injury and Pain,
Red Squirrel,
Words Like Cold Whiskey Between Us and Pain,
Bear Meadow,
Fever Dream in Hanoi,
from New Poems 1995–1998,
After the Others,
The Happy Land,
Praise Wound Dirt Skin Sky,
The Inexplicable Abandonment of Habit in Eclipse,
Elegy for Her Whose Name You Don't Know,
River Journal,
Anniversary of Myself,
Why I'm Not Afraid,
And We Came Home,
The Choosing of Mozart's Fantasie Over Suicide,
Pineapple,
The Nothing Redemption,
The Singing and the Dancing,
Our Independence Day,
The Future,
The Happiness of Others,
Our Lies and Their Beauty,
Notes,