Rowing Through the Ashes
The Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc…at a downtown crossroads in Saigon sat in the lotus posture and, in a state of meditative control, burned himself to death in protest.
In Vietnam, we rowed an old wooden boat
down and around the lush green our country
tried to destroy, stopping to visit temples
and admire simple gifts of orange things:
food and flowers, boxes of crackers,
wrinkled bills. No one touches
the offerings. The world is in no hurry
here. I didn’t understand Vietnam
as a boy and understand even less
as a man. Is complexity quicksand,
or is that simplicity? The more I learned
about Vietnam, the more shame I felt.
When a young boy on shore, smiled
and gave me the finger, I just nodded.
No way to get lost on that long,
meandering lake. Do they teach
meandering in basic training? Old
enough to get a draft card, young
enough to miss getting called.
Lyndon Johnson on TV, my fellow
Americans. Our father let us change
the channel to the Canadian station
with Popeye cartoons, televised limbo
contests, and curling. Canada, close
enough to row to. Drive through a tunnel
beneath the river. Friendly border.
They waved us through. Years later,
my parents admitted they would have let
me cross that river if I’d won
the death lottery. An old man on the train
from Hanoi held up his hand
to keep me from sitting beside him
then later let a woman take that seat.
He made room. No hard feelings.
They dug a lot of tunnels in Vietnam—
pretty cramped down there.
We forced them underground.
Or into caves. On the lake, we row
through many tunnels, ducking to avoid
low ceilings. I bumped my head once,
but not again. Lyndon Johnson seemed
so sad with his big ears and big nose.
My fellow Americans, shoveling
more teenagers over there to die.
Don’t ask me why. Don’t make me lie.
Maybe we should have left the news on
more often. The casualty numbers
always said we’d killed more of them
and thus were winning. No one I knew
had died yet. I was still living in the Canada
of grief. Limber enough to limbo lower.
Old enough to have friends who’d either
take the death leap or take their business
elsewhere or starve to fail their physicals
only to get called back and have to starve
all over again in order to be called one
of the lucky ones. Quiet on the water
just the paddles’ light dive and curve
from morning into afternoon, until
we looped back through one final cave
where urns of monks’ ashes sat stored
in crags on either side. Safe in that darkness
we bowed our heads to all we didn’t
know, then to all we don’t know now,
then to all we pretended not to know,
lost in time, despite knowing our location
in space, gliding through the urns of ashes
toward the light.
DUSK
Okay, it’s quiet here now, and we can talk. Here and now being relative things. A cracked cement slab of a porch, the blur between day and night. Quiet being a relative thing, given the chattering cicadas in the trees I can’t see. Just leaves, barely swaying in light breeze, like I’m in some lazy nightclub after hours, the only one left, nowhere to go, or perhaps it’s the one place I want to be. The light, muted orange, the smell, muted orange. Good light for dancing alone to percussion. Or a lack of percussion, even our own hearts smoothening into graceful, subtle waves without spikes or plunges. I said we can talk, which means we don’t have to. We have to breathe, to not think about breathing. The imperative shrugs its head and closes its eyes. Hovering solitude. I’m swimming toward, not away, water barely stirring through my cupped hands.
