Introducing
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.”
