Tape #5: For Representative Garner Shriver, 4th District, Kansas

I knew his name, then Sơn Mỹ knew it too,
the afternoon unmaking private Jack
in one clean sound. The rest came nameless; new
and faceless, ma; that’s how you keep your shit intact
in Country. Just like yesterday, Sơn Tịnh:
a mine took one and left the other shaking
photographs at me—him, his girl, thin
last arguments, the body making
cases to whoever’s left, the margins gone,
his leg Gomorrah-black—what God reveals
to hands the mind can’t hold for long:
Jenny sealed in plastic as her lover squeals
the thigh’s bright arterial song, with both
my hands inside his upper thigh, the sworn
and ancient dark of it, the living growth,
a stranger’s flesh, the morning newly torn
above Hội An, a leg, another dead, the worth
of Lucky Strikes pressed warm into my palm;
Da Nang, my rifle laid against the earth—
the Captain’s smile, the road’s long ready psalm.