The Moon Reflected Fire

Doug Anderson

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781882295036
• eBook ISBN: 9781938584473
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Poesia americana

Of The Moon Reflected Fire and its subject, the Vietnam War, poet James Tate writes: "These are trenchant, wrenching poems. With artistry and honesty they perform an inquest into war and its corrosive after effects."

PART ONE

NIGHT AMBUSH

We are still, lips swollen with mosquito bites.

A treeline opens out onto paddies

quartered by dikes, a moon in each,

and in the center, the hedged island of a village

floats in its own time, ribboned with smoke.

Someone is cooking fish.

Whispers move across water.

Children and old people. Anyone between

is a target. It is so quiet

you can hear a safety clicked off

all the way on the other side.

Things live in my hair. I do not bathe.

I have thrown away my underwear.

I have forgotten the why of everything.

I sense an indifference larger than anything

I know. All that will remain of us

is rusting metal disappearing in vines.

Above the fog that clots the hill ahead

a red tracer arcs and dims.

A black snake slides off the paddy dike

into the water and makes the moon shiver.

INFANTRY ASSAULT

The way he made that corpse dance

by emptying one magazine after another into it

and the way the corpse’s face began to peel off

like a mask because the skull had been shattered, brains

spilled out, but he couldn’t stop killing that corpse,

wanted to make damn sure, I thought maybe

he was killing all the ones he’d missed, and

the way they dragged that guy out of the stream,

cut him to pieces, the stream running red

with all the bodies in it, and the way the captain

didn’t try to stop them, his silence saying No Prisoners and

the way when all the Cong were dead, lined up in rows,

thirty-nine in all, our boys went to work on all the pigs

and chickens in the village until

there was no place that was not red, and

finally, how the thatch was lit, the village burned

and how afterwards we were quiet riding back

on the tracks, watching the ancestral serpent rise

over the village in black coils, and

how our bones knew what we’d done.

DOC

They kill them like flies over there

he had slurred on the bus full

of drunk marines going back to Las Pulgas.

Like flies. Corpsmen,

he was talking about.

Six months later I was a replacement,

saw coffins being loaded onto transports

on the airstrip coming in.

Lived through the first firefight,

the second; had a little bag

of wisdom to croak out

to the fool who would replace me:

Break down your medical kit,

pack the innards in your pockets;

get rid of your pistol,

buy a black market shotgun, greasegun,

anything to make you look like

something other than what you are;

and don’t walk behind the radioman

or the squad leader on patrol;

they ambush the center of the column,

and by the way,

a muzzle pointed your way pops flat,

away, it echoes;

the round that gets you you won’t hear.

BAMBOO BRIDGE

We cross the bridge, quietly.

The bathing girl does not see us

till we’ve stopped and gaped like fools.

There are no catcalls, whoops,

none of the things that soldiers do;

the most stupid of us is silent, rapt.

She might be fourteen or twenty,

sunk thigh deep in green water,

her woman’s pelt a glistening corkscrew,

a wonder, a wonder she is; I forgot.

For a moment we all hold the same thought,

that there is life in life and war is shit.

For a song we’d all go to the mountains,

eat pineapples, drink goat’s milk,

find a girl like this, who cares

her teeth are stained with betel nut,

her hands as hard as feet.

If I can live another month it’s over,

and so we think a single thought,

a bell’s resonance.

And then she turns and sees us there,

sinks in the water, eyes full of hate;

the trance broken.

We move into the village on the other side.

AMBUSH

In the village we unsling our rifles,

drop our packs, light cigarettes, eat, piss,

sleep fly-covered in the heat.

A round comes by my ear, an angry wasp,

and crabwise I scuttle for a hole that isn’t there.

There is shouting everywhere, someone is hit.

I see the lieutenant point his pistol with both hands;

a water buffalo is bearing down on him,

stampeded by the shooting. Beside a cistern,

a monk, saffron robed, squats and laughs.

There is a woman running past

tripping on her ao dai, but no, it’s not.

Before I can shout a warning the garment comes unsashed,

instead of womanflesh, an automatic rifle

flashes in an arc, and firing from the hip,

the man runs for his life.

Someone trying to duck smashes my nose with his elbow.

It is now quiet. Seven bodies lie in the village road;

three are ours, more are wounded.

My cigarette not gone halfway I begin to treat them.

JUDGMENT

Near Hoi Ahn, 1967

Pinned down two hours in a Buddhist graveyard

by two barefoot snipers who will not die

no matter how many mortars we walk their way.

They keep moving, the one firing, the other

doubling back where the mortars have already been,

nor are they silenced by the gunship

now squandering rockets

at inkblots flickering between trees.

These wraiths sing with their crack and whine,

We will die to hold you here

while the others slip away toward the mountains.

What will you die for?

Me hunkerin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• Note to the Reader
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• PART ONE
• PART TWO: Los Desastres de la Guerra
• PART THREE: Raids On Homer
• PART FOUR
• About the Author
• About the Publisher