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A New Viet
Nam
1
sweat of bolts &
nails
muscle like steel & metal
architects’ work at a ripping pitch
pounding out
a new capitol
around the lakes
morning to evening the ground explodes
liquid concrete
mercury ambling down streets
you think you are the noise
men
pick at French-laid concrete like crows
shovels and picks at shoulders
they stand knees in earth
pain trots
down the street
how
life would’ve been more than noise
how events should’ve
happened
2
Hue --
what do you make of chance
life's but a dollar a day
what should you say when a person
dies each day
in the Demilitarized Zone scrounging for scrap metal
shrapnel
unexploded
bullets & bombs on trays like shrimp
before tourists?
the hills
now there now disappearing
white claws stream down from dumped chemicals
a
fun house of horror
still after
decades the Khe Sanh Combat Base
is nearly flat; the Ho Chi Minh trail winds
thirty minutes
to Laos, & National Highway 1 threading
the country in one
is it chance
that the Hue dialect is a giddy
fish never to be hooked?
the language
is imagined by the land's vapors
fluctuating hills
the mirage of white sand
by dreams of
the brood
of cows walking through white mountains
a woman fries her smoky meal
next to a moon crater
3
honey-moon
light swoops over the valleys
upon
the Da Lat mountains
like squadrons
a man buys
two bunches of bananas in half a second
I
linger & face the remark
of the vendor "chui
nao cung nhu vay het
co hien
qua di vao buon ban di"
(“the
bananas are all the same you’re too naive go into business”)
I pass the
Nuclear Research Center
prop from an old movie
on a deserted mountain
toward the
Domaine de Marie Convent a pink
church “once
house to 300 nuns” someone waves
then past the
cemetery a mountain of crosses
which doesn’t stop rising
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