PORTRAIT

I find the picture of the woman

and child in his pocket,

ziplocked in a baggie, preserving it

from the damp and fetid Delta air

which swaddles us,

each and every one.

The little girl’s a Mekong peach

in a long white frilly dress.

Her raven hair flutters against

the saffron of her cherub cheeks.

Smiling a bit uncertainly,

she clutches a shopworn rosary.

Mama-san’s full of silk solemnity,

and doesn’t smile at all.

The snapshot’s of a first communion.

After pledging allegiance to my God,

mother and child stood outside

in the churchyard and were captured

for posterity by Papa-san,

one of the dead here in front of me.

Last night, I wasted him

as he rushed our boundary wire.

His chest is a mess,

his eye is blown beyond repair,

his brain’s still somewhere

out in the marsh.

Now I get to bag his body.

He’ll be trucked with his friends

way on down beyond away from here,

to a shallow ditch ‘dozed just downriver,

on the treeline edge of their napalmed ville.

I clap his hands around

this curling image of his kin,

and then I wrestle him

into a baggie, preserving them

from the damp and fetid Delta air

which swallows us,

each and every one.