Tape #5: To 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:
Grace sealed in plastic as her lover squeals
that 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.