Archeology of the Circle New and Selected Poems

by Weigl, Bruce

• ISBN13: 9780802136077
• ISBN10: 0802136079
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-03-12
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

With Song of Napalm, Bruce Weigl established himself as a poet of incomparable power and lyric fury whose work stands as an elegy to the countless lives dramatically altered by war. Archeology of the Circle brings together the major work of one of America's greatest poets. Collected here for the first time, from eight volumes of poetry and spanning two decades, the poems in Archeology of the Circle also include Bruce Weigl's most recent work, which takes a dramatic turn toward a hard-bitten and sensuous lyric. Out of the horror of individual experience, Bruce Weigl has fashioned poetry that offers solace to disillusionment and bears transcendent resonance for all of us. Archeology of the Circle illustrates Bruce Weigl's remarkable creative achievements and signifies his own personal and spiritual salvation through his writing.

Table of Contents

Pigeons	p. 3
Mines	p. 4
Monkey	p. 6
Short	p. 16
Anna Grasa	p. 17
Sailing to Bien Hoa	p. 21
The Deer Hunter	p. 22
Convoy	p. 23
Him, on the Bicycle	p. 24
A Romance	p. 29
On This Spot	p. 31
Cardinal	p. 32
The Man Who Made Me Love Him	p. 33
The Life Before Fear	p. 35
Dogs	p. 36
I Have Had My Time Rising and Singing	p. 38
Painting on a T'ang Dynasty Water Vessel	p. 40
The Harp	p. 42
Amnesia	p. 45
Girl at the Chu Lai Laundry	p. 46
Burning Shit at An Khe	p. 47
1955	p. 50
Song for the Lost Private	p. 52
Killing Chickens	p. 54
The Last Lie	p. 57
Temple Near Quang Tri, Not on the Map	p. 58
Surrounding Blues on the Way Down	p. 60
Elegy for A.	p. 62
Noise	p. 64
Regret for the Mourning Doves Who Failed to Mate	p. 66
Mercy	p. 67
Small Song for Andrew	p. 69
The Streets	p. 70
Snowy Egret	p. 71
Song of Napalm	p. 73
Introduction	p. 79
The Way of Tet	p. 81
Some Thoughts on the Ambassador: Bong Son, 1967	p. 83
LZ Nowhere	p. 84
Breakdown	p. 85
On the Anniversary of Her Grace	p. 86
Apparition of the Exile	p. 88
The Soldier's Brief Epistle	p. 89
Dialectical Materialism	p. 90
The Kiss	p. 92
Elegy	p. 94
Her Life Runs Like a Red Silk Flag	p. 97
Why Nothing Changes for Miss Ngo Thi Thanh	p. 99
The Loop	p. 101
What Saves Us	p. 102
In the House of Immigrants	p. 104
Temptation	p. 106
Shelter	p. 108
They Name Heaven	p. 110
On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat	p. 112
The Sky in Daduza Township	p. 113
The Hand That Takes	p. 115
This Man	p. 120
In the Autumn Village	p. 121
May	p. 123
The Confusion of Planes We Must Wander in Sleep	p. 125
The Biography of Fatty's Bar and Grille	p. 126
The Years Without Understanding	p. 128
The Black Hose	p. 130
Blues at the Equinox	p. 133
The Impossible	p. 134
The Forms of Eleventh Avenue	p. 136
Sitting with the Buddhist Monks, Hue, 1967	p. 141
The One	p. 143
What I Saw and Did in the Alley	p. 146
Care	p. 148
At the Confluence of Memory and Desire in Lorain, Ohio	p. 151
Three Meditations at Nguyen Du	p. 152
That Finished Feeling	p. 155
Hymn of My Republic	p. 157
Our 17th Street Years	p. 159
Carp	p. 160
Conversation of Our Blood	p. 161
Three Fish	p. 164
Our Middle Years	p. 166
Elegy for Peter	p. 167
My Early Training	p. 169
Meditation at Melville Ave	p. 171
Meditation at Hue	p. 173
On the Ambiguity of Injury and Pain	p. 174
Red Squirrel	p. 175
Words Like Cold Whiskey Between Us and Pain	p. 176
Bear Meadow	p. 178
Fever Dream in Hanoi	p. 180
After the Others	p. 187
The Happy Land	p. 189
Praise Wound Dirt Skin Sky	p. 190
The Inexplicable Abandonment of Habit in Eclipse	p. 191
Elegy for Her Whose Name You Don't Know	p. 192
River Journal	p. 193
Anniversary of Myself	p. 194
Why I'm Not Afraid	p. 196
And We Came Home	p. 199
The Choosing of Mozart's Fantasie Over Suicide	p. 201
Pineapple	p. 202
The Nothing Redemption	p. 204
The Singing and the Dancing	p. 206
Our Independence Day	p. 208
The Future	p. 210
The Happiness of Others	p. 212
Our Lies and Their Beauty	p. 213
Notes	p. 217
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

Chapter One

    PIGEONS

There's a man standing

in a coop,

his face is wet,

he says he's too old:

"You can't give them away

they just come back."

I follow him to the cellar.

Latin blessings on the wall,

sauerkraut in barrels,

he puts his arm around my waist

begins to make a noise,

pigeons bleeding.

We're both crying now

he moves his tongue around

pulls feathers from his coat.

A fantail he says,

the kind that hop around,

don't fly well.

    MINES

    1

In Vietnam I was always afraid of mines:

North Vietnamese mines, Vietcong mines,

American mines,

whole fields marked with warning signs.

A bouncing betty comes up waist high--

cuts you in half.

One man's legs were laid

alongside him in the Dustoff:

he asked for a chairback, morphine.

He screamed he wanted to give

his eyes away, his kidneys,

his heart ...

    2

  

    MONKEY

    1

I am you are he she it is

they are you are we are.

I am you are he she it is

they are you are we are.

When they ask for your number

pretend to be breathing.

Forget the stinking jungle,

force your fingers between the lines.

Learn to get out of the dew.

The snakes are thirsty.

Bladders, water, boil it, drink it.

Get out of your clothes:

You can't move in your green clothes.

Your O.D. in color issue clothes.

Get out the damp between your legs.

Get out the plates and those who ate.

Those who spent the night.

Those small Vietnamese soldiers.

They love to hold your hand.

A fine man is good to hard.

Back away from their dark cheeks.

Small Vietnamese soldiers.

They love to love you.

I have no idea how it happened,

I remember nothing but light.

    2

I don't remember the hard

swallow of the lover.

I don't remember the burial

of ears.

I don't remember the time

of the explosion.

This is the place curses are

manufactured: delivered like

white tablets.

The survivor is spilling his bed pan.

He slips one in your pocket,

you're finally satisfied.

I don't remember the heat

in the hands,

the heat around the neck.

Good times bad times sleep

get up work. Sleep get up

good times bad times.

Work eat sleep good bad work times.

I like a certain cartoon of wounds.

The water which refuses to dry.

I like a little unaccustomed mercy.

Pulling the trigger is all we have.

I hear a child.

    3

I dropped to the bottom of a well.

I have a knife.

I cut someone with it.

Oh, I have the petrified eyebrows

of my Vietnam monkey.

My monkey from Vietnam.

My monkey.

Put your hand here.

It makes no sense.

I beat the monkey with a sword.

I didn't know him.

He was bloody.

He lowered his intestines

to my shoes. My shoes

spit-shined the moment

I learned to tie the bow.

I'm not on speaking terms

with anyone. In the wrong climate

a person can spoil,

the way a pair of boots

slows you down ...

I don't know when I'm sleeping.

I don't know if what I'm saying

is anything at all.

I'll lay on my monkey bones.

    4

I'm tired of the rice falling

in slow motion like eggs from

the smallest animal.

I'm twenty-five years old,

quiet, tired of the same mistakes,

the same greed, the same past.

The same past with its bleat

and pound of the dead,

with its hand grenade tossed

into a hooch on a dull Sunday

because when a man dies like that

his eyes sparkle,

his nose fills with witless nuance

because a farmer in Bong Son

has dead cows lolling

in a field of claymores

because the vc tie hooks

to their comrades

because a spot of blood

is a number

because a woman

is lifting her dress across

the big pond ...

If we're soldiers we should smoke them

if we have them. Someone's bound

to point us in the right direction

sooner or later.

    I'm tired and I'm glad you asked.

    5

There is a hill.

Men run top hill.

Men take hill.

Give hill to man.

*

Me and my monkey

and me and my monkey

my Vietnamese monkey

my little brown monkey

came with me

to Guam and Hawaii

in Ohio he saw

my people he

jumped on my daddy

he slipped into mother

he baptized my sister

he's my little brown monkey

he came here from heaven

to give me his spirit imagine

my monkey my beautiful

monkey he saved me lifted

me above the punji

sticks above the mines

above the ground burning

above the dead above

the living above the

wounded dying the wounded

dying above my own body

until I am me.

*

Men take hill away from smaller men.

Men take hill and give to fatter man.

Men take hill. Hill has number.

Men run up hill. Run down hill.

Copyright © 1999 Bruce Weigl. All rights reserved.