The Man We Threw from the Sky

Though the memory doesn't feel like mine,

I must have been there, moving north north-west,

holding, up above the Perfume River, 

with Simon, Isaac, our Arab gunner,

Vince, called Pineapple because of his face,

the NVA who kept on smiling

who would not stop to save his own life,

and Peter who had stopped asking questions,

having seen what no one should live to see

after Hue, and down to one emotion.

And if you could have held your head just right

seen the paint falling from the recent world

the old paint, there all the time, coming through,

you'd see our ancient nightmare carnival

framed in the CH-47's door

the Bosch pentimento of Viet Nam:

Here's child-meretrix selling her same ass

there in the tents which are huge green mussels.

The cargo choppers become dead-eyed fish

held down by the green bags of what remained

and the bodies, Jesus, pieces of bodies

women and boys in pieces, hanging in trees.

The dragons blowing their orange fires

with those same six hundred year old ravens

afterwards, and always a crescent moon.

But Bosch was wrong about how a man falls

In his Descent of the Damned into Hell

not handed to the air like a new bride,

or set down into space like firewood,

but arms out forward, braced, and on his knees

like a child's doubtful Indian dive,

but holding, past fear, and on both knees.

A parody of some liveable fall

with the river a lifetime below him.

The rest was just as Bosch warned us it'd be

and I'm not offended at our likeness:

demon-apes, empty of everything else,

prehensile hands, demon-hands, 

just like mine.