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Fred Marchant
USA
| In 1970, during the war in
Viet Nam, Fred Marchant became one of the first Marine officers ever
to be honorably discharged as a conscientious objector. Marchant is
the author of Tipping Point, which won the Washington Prize in
poetry. His other collections include Full Moon Boat (Graywolf
Press) and House on Water, House in Air (Dedalus Press,
Dublin, Ireland). His poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in many
newspapers, journals, and anthologies, including AGNI,
Harvard Review, and Ploughshares, and he has received
fellowships from the MacDowell, Ucross, and Yaddo Colonies. He is a
professor of English and the director of creative writing at Suffolk
University in Boston, and he is a teaching affiliate of the William
Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the
University of Massachusetts, Boston. |
I. from Tipping Point, Winner of the 1993 Washington Prize
(The Word Works, Inc., 1994).
Viet Nam Era
In 1959 you were thirteen and rose
earlier than you ever
imagined, knowing birds had nothing
on you, leaving on
an empty stomach to deliver the news,
ignoring your mother's
sleepy warnings, beating your lathered
father out the door,
to hop now on the company bike
and ride to the station
where your Globes and Heralds waited
to be folded and stuffed
into the wire basket, the canvas bag.
Let everyone else go
fishing: you patrolled an uncharted
city, a zone dawning
in headlines and traffic. You were
losing baby fat and
saving money for school. The papers
you heaved you imagined
grenades, and that the porches they
landed on burst into flame,
sending the little girls out flying
straight into your arms,
arms already smeared with the ink
from the world's bloody
deeds, your own war only seven years away.
Tipping Point
Late blue light, the East
China Sea, a half-mile out. . .
masked, snorkeled, finned,
rising for air, longing for it,
and in love with the green
knife-edged hillsides, the thick
aromatic forests, and not ready
for the line of B-52's coming in
low on the horizon, three airplanes
at a time, bomb-empty after
the all-day run to Viet Nam.
Long, shuddering wings, and predatory,
dorsal tail-fins, underbelly
in white camouflage, the rest
jungle-green, saural, as if a gecko had
grown wings, a tail-fin, and
nightmare proportions. Chest deep,
on the reef-edge, I think of the war smell
which makes it back here:
damp red clay, cordite, and fear-salts
woven into the fabric of everything not
metal: tarps, webbed-belts,
and especially the jungle "utes,"
the utilities, the fatigue blouses
and trousers which were not
supposed to rip, but breathe,
and breathe they do--not so much
of death--but rather the long
living with it, sleeping in it,
not ever washing your body free of it.
A corporal asked me if he still stank.
I told him no, and he said,
"With all due respect, Lieutenant,
I don't believe you." A sea snake,
habu, slips among the corals,
and I hover while it slowly passes.
My blue surf mat wraps its rope
around me, tugs inland
at my hips while I drift over ranges
of thick, branching elkhorn,
over lilac-pale anemones,
over the crown-of-thorns starfish,
and urchins spinier than naval
mines, over mottled slugs,
half-buried clams, iridescent angelfish.
The commanding general said,
"Every man has a tipping point,
a place where his principles give way."
I told him I did not belong
to any nation on earth, but
a chill shift of wind, its hint of squall
beyond the mountain tells me
no matter what I said or how,
it will be a long swim back,
my complicities in tow.
II. from Full Moon Boat
(Graywolf Press, 2000)
A Reading During Time of War
It is the moment just before,
with no intent to punish,
a wish for all to be air
and scrubbed by rain,
filled with eagerness to learn
and be if not a child
then open-hearted, at-ease,
never to have heard
of the bending river
that stretches to the delta
where a bloated corpse
bumps softly,
snags on a tree stump
and, water-logged,
rolls slowly, just below.
The Return
When he poured acid for his etching,
Blake said the art he practiced was infernal,
meaning it brimmed with the energy of demons
who first of all had been angels. On the wall
of the bedroom I inherited from my grandfather
hung a gold-framed etching titled "The Return"--
a doughboy kneeling before a larger-than-life
crucifix, the helmet and rifle on the floor,
his calves wrapped with puttees, his head
half-hidden by a bulging, cinched-up knapsack.
Harry, older uncle on my mother's side,
quit college to go to France in 1916.
He flew a Spad in the Lafayette Escadrille,
and never wanted to fly again afterwards.
In one photo, the polished sash of his Sam
Browne belt gleams in the ocean sunlight.
He is sailing home, and a swell has leaned
him into the bulkhead. Under the smile
you can see his fear that life thereafter
would turn out to be another flying coffin.
In 1970, Georgette, Harry's war-bride,
wrote to me on Okinawa, pleading that
that I not leave the service as a conscientious
objector. She said Jesus could not approve,
He had smiled on America, and I owed
back some portion of what I had been given.
The airplane I flew home on, my c.o.
discharge in hand, was an empty, airborne
auditorium, another sign of the nation's excesses.
When I woke, I looked out over the desert.
At first I thought I saw a land split
apart by our history of rage and sorrow,
but as we cruised through a vast clarity
of air thousands of feet up, the creases
of deep, dried-out arroyos reminded me
of the pack that belonged to the soldier
who hung over my childhood sleep
and taught me, before I ever understood
a word like puttee, how good it would feel
to take a helmet off, set the weapon down.
Archives
for Kevin Bowen
The photographs are kept in flint-gray boxes,
wheeled in on waist-high carts whose squeaks
irritate the researcher taking notes nearby.
I lift the flimsy, protective tissue as if it were
gauze through which blood has been seeping,
and beneath is a field-hospital where a medic
tends to a civilian woman's wounded hip.
His eyes say she's worse off than she thinks.
Next is a corpse in a hammering sun, torso
twisted over his legs. Squatting beside him
is a boy whose bare white arms rest lightly
on his knees, a cigarette in his cupped hand.
The asked-for smile is floating on his face,
is loyal only to the dead, is embarrassed.
Bones to Ha Noi
He is wary in the train station,
the rucksack bundled in his arms
as if it were holy. He tries to be
casual so as not to let anyone think
it is important enough to steal.
There is a policy which forbids
boarding a train with the remains
of a body, but surely others have
done so, even if the train would
then be haunted by an unburied
soul, and dangerous for a while.
But these are a brother's bones,
coming back from a ditch in
Quang Tri. Ten years and still
many are intact. Tibia, fibula,
digits, vertebrae. How can he
be sure he has them all or whose
are which? Pieces are scattered
at the bottom of the rucksack,
inside the curve of half-ribs
that fence his toiletries, a change
of clothing. Such packing makes
it very difficult to find his novel,
so he sits like a peasant to market,
leaning on what no one knows
he holds. He feels devoid of
thoughts other than suspicion,
and feels dry-hardened as these
he loves and carries and cannot smell.
Corita's Tank
The freeway shudders under heavy trailers,
and layers of accumulating afternoon heat.
A cormorant perches atop an inlet piling,
the creosote log, driven into the silt, swaying
in a trace of tide. Desolate gravel raked
around the storage farms, the winter-fuel stockpile.
Then, monumentally squat, the natural gas
tank, its white bulk painted with six rough stripes,
each band of color an act of faith
to alter, however slightly, the public soul.
When the Vietnamese literary delegation
ate lunch with us under the founders' portraits,
Hu'u Thinh said that in Viet Nam no one felt
censored. Writing was for the "survival of the nation,"
a selflessness asked of all, especially artists.
I was polite, but eager to tell him of the dissidence
of Sister Corita, her profile of Ho Chi Minh
on the gas tank. On the left side of the blue swath
you can see the curve of his brow, the wisps
off his chin, with one eye gazing westward over
this highway, surprised perhaps to be there.
I am sweating at the wheel, inching
forward, trying not to graze the man in a field-jacket
as he pushes a shopping cart down the inside
lane. I have seen him before, with his redeemable
trash: the empties, a comforter. Some tap
their temples, call him a nut, but a sadness thick
as heat off the freeway comes over me
when I picture him falling into fitful, dangerous sleep,
or leaning to piss on the scored abutments.
Maybe it's allegiance mixed in with the sadness,
an intuition that no matter how desolate
or bereft we become, there are signs of hidden life,
weedy, rooted, and not apologetic.
He is barely audible in his discourse to no one,
his lips just visible behind a slow,
deeply serious, upraised middle finger. The desire
is to break anything, a face, a wall,
a window. It's a spirit mean as asphalt: pungent,
pliable, staining, flattening.
Maybe he's measuring off the stretch
of bay out to the island where they aerate the sludge.
Or maybe he is just aiming at the jet
coming in, or planning to drop a mortar shell down
an imaginary tube. Or he's keying on the glint,
the flare under the aluminum wings coming in over
the art of Sister Corita, over Uncle Ho,
over the boiling line of stalled cars and mirror-glass
towers of wealth which are blinking in code,
coming to rest here on the rim of a broken wheel,
the hub of which this man thinks of as home
†
The Kinh Tay Ferry
We think they are crossing.
Here where bombs fell under the cries of the stork,
where dike walls are alive with winter grasses.
We think they are crossing again.
On the slope where the pavement ends
and willows are thin arms in the wind
a woman squats by her bicycle,
a rice bale strapped to its rack, too heavy to push.
We think they are crossing here,
just beyond the lotus growing in the bomb-crater ponds,
just beyond the ferry's dented bow,
our arms pushing with her now.
Letter
by Tran Dang Khoa
co-translated by Fred Marchant & Nguyen Ba Chung
Mother, I may well fall in this war,
fall in the line of duty--as will so many others--
just like straw for the village thatch.
And one morning you may--as many others--
hold in your hand a piece of paper,
a flimsy little sheaf of paper
heavier than a thousand-pound bomb,
one which will destroy the years you have left.
Even so, don't weep. . . I'm not dead yet.
Why not read in the Tale of Kieu?
Maybe then, peace under the shade of our palm.
You could lean on the door and wait for me
as you used to. You could listen for our steps,
see us coming home from school, arm in arm,
laden with books, giggling by the window,
as the evening passes into silence.
When night settles over the house,
over the garden. . .
over the sky. . .
night warm and smooth as silk,
I want you to leave the door ajar.
Through the house a wind will sing
its love of sky and cloud, and bring you
to the sweet arms of sleep, unaware
your son has slipped in, found his way
home on airs that wander the earth
seeking only to soothe the mothers
whose children have been lost.
III. from
House on Water, House in Air (Dedalus Press,
Dublin, Ireland, 2002)
†
Occasional Verses at Con Son, After the War
by Nguyen Trai (1380-1422)
co-translated by Fred Marchant & Nguyen Ba Chung
Ten years away from what I knew and loved as home,
I return to pine and chrysanthemum grown rampant,
to patient streams and trees wondering where I have been.
I am covered in dust.
There was nothing else I could do.
Now that I am home my life seems nothing but a dream.
The war may be over, I may be alive, but I want nothing
more than a cloud-tipped mountain, good tea, a stone pillow.
War Story
Since we are of the species
claiming a soul different from
the animals, it is no surprise
that today my first undeliberate
thought when I woke was of
how easy it would be to call in
artillery, to walk it slowly across
the fields of the past, the horses
grazing there, the children with
books, the soaking clothes that
hang and dry, to bring it home
and do this without thinking,
to take vague pride in what
I honestly know is achievement,
though it is to think like a horse
who early in life had been trained
to move around an oily spindle
and think he gets somewhere.
ALL POEMS ARE REPRINTED HERE WITH PERMISSION OF THE
AUTHOR
© All Copyright, Fred
Marchant.
All Rights Reserved. Printed By
Permission.
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