Poems
by Peter Mladinic

 

Gatherers

 

At a distance, they looked like neatly stacked

piles of laundry.  We were riding in the back

of a big truck, the morning after the first night

of Tet, coming in from Danang.

 

The firefight left in its wake dead Vietnamese

soldiers in rice paddies near

bridge cargo, bodies in a rectangular strip

where, other days, choppers rose

 

and landed. Our truck flew by.

 

They were alive and healthy when the truck

dropped me off at the admiral’s quarters,

in a neighborhood. Then the fighting started.

The Vietnam they died in, elsewhere goes on.

 

Bodies stacked in rows.

 

A vision I’ll take with me, to a top

bunk I’ll crawl into,

to a chow line, to a sandbag fortified

bunker, and wonder now

 

who gathered the dead

from the rice paddies?  Who stacked

the bodies in rows?  Did one or two or more

take a watch off a wrist or a picture

 

or money, while someone “looked

the other way”? What the gatherers

remember, does each see it differently

now, far the wide rectangular strip

 

where the dead lay, those who the night

claimed, those who were moving, moving

through the war, and fell wounded,

crying out to the dark.

 

 

 

 

 

 Mother

 

There are songs about spouses, sons,

daughters, clouds above rivers, stars

above rural roads, and fingers pulling red

cellophane ribbons from packs of Lucky

Strikes. Songs about sparrows sipping

from puddles near curbs, and letters carved

in wooden slats of bus stop benches.

Songs about tin foil wrappers thousands

of eyes have encountered after thousands

of hands have unwrapped Spearmint sticks

of gum, songs about Bazooka Bubble Gum,

horses, hoarders, politicians, and spiritual

leaders. I remember a film about Neruda and

Machu Pichuu, and a film of Octavio Paz and

Mark Strand talking. Paz says “no such thing

as the common man.” A horn honks.  Paz and

Strand wear neckties. There are songs about

neckties and songs about swans on ponds.

I remember pulling a red ribbon from a pack

of cigarettes, and a russet canopy with white

letters in cursive at the entrance of a funeral

home. I remember heaven. one Wednesday

night in May. A woman said of her undertaker

son, “He loves to learn.” A change came over

the listener’s face upon their hearing words

expressing a mother’s pride. I remember

her rimless specs, the closed eyes of the one

in the casket, black beads placed in those

still hands by hands of the undertaker,

who was going to school to be a doctor.

 

 

 

 

 

Playing Dead in Malta

 

Outside a church, sunlight.

In a circular flowerpot, a dead

black and white cat no one takes away

slowly wakes.

It looked really good at playing dead.

If I tried that, a person hovering over me

would say, “You’re doing it all wrong.”

 

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