On the Shores of Welcome Home
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ON THE SHORES OF WELCOME HOME
ON THE SHORES OF WELCOME
HOME
POEMS
BRUCE WEIGL
AMERICAN POETS CONTINUUM SERIES, NO. 175
BOA EDITIONS, LTD. ROCHESTER, NY 2019
Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Weigl
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition
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For information about permission to reuse any material from this book, please contact The
Permissions Company at www.permissionscompany.com or e-mail [email protected].
Publications by BOA Editions, Ltd.—a not-for-profit corporation under section 501 (c) (3) of the
United States Internal Revenue Code—are made possible with funds from a variety of sources,
including public funds from the Literature Program of the National Endowment for the Arts; the New
York State Council on the Arts, a state agency; and the County of Monroe, NY. Private funding
sources include the Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation; the Mary S. Mulligan Charitable
Trust; the Rochester Area Community Foundation; the Ames-Amzalak Memorial Trust in memory of
Henry Ames, Semon Amzalak, and Dan Amzalak; the LGBT Fund of Greater Rochester; and
contributions from many individuals nationwide. See Colophon on page 100 for special individual
acknowledgments.
Cover Design: Sandy Knight
Interior Design and Composition: Richard Foerster
BOA Logo: Mirko
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Weigl, Bruce, 1949– , author.
Title: The shores of welcome home : poems / Bruce Weigl.
Description: First edition. | Rochester, NY : BOA Editions, Ltd., 2019. | Series: American poets
continuum series ; no. 175
Identifiers: LCCN 2019019107 | ISBN 9781942683896 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Psychological aspects—Poetry. | Veterans—Mental
health—United States—Poetry. | Older veterans—United States—Poetry. | War poetry, American.
Classification: LCC PS3573.E3835 A6 2019 | DDC 811/.54—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019107
BOA Editions, Ltd.
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A. Poulin, Jr., Founder (1938–1996)
For Sonny Bunzo and Mila Vy
CONTENTS
Part One
The Elephant Gift in the Room
You Can Hide
Painted Box Buried in the Yard
Grace Being Saved
Anecdote of the Impresario of My Brain
Some Stages of the Mayfly
Against Poetry
River of Blood in One Man
Prayer for My Teacher
Against Forgetting (One)
Fragments in Translation from the Vietnamese
Lotus
Reading the River
Ode to Cabeza de Vaca
A Late Corrupted Flash
Not My Brain Talkin’
Words for My Pal Who Is Dead
The Long-Term Consequences of the Convoy Leading to Pegasus in the
Fallen World
The World Part II
The Unbearable Weight of a Friend
Act of Contrition
Altarpiece of the Misericordia
Lotus, West Lake, 2010
The Hà Nội Winds Bringing Winter to the Old-World Elegy
The Ineffable as Sad
Part Two
On the Shores of Welcome Home
Part Three
Making the Conscious Darkness
The Beauty
Bodhisattva Blurred by Lilies in the Garden
My Araby
Village Parable
The Love I Thought Would Save Me
C, F, and G
Modern Paradox Sutra Fragment
Moon Sutra
Love in Space
The Sixty-sixth Year of My Imagining
For Night
Dismantling Bruce Weigl at Gate Number 7
My Father’s Money
A Mishap
Sweeping in the Temple
What If I Told You
Oh Denial
For a Friend Whose Son Is in Prison
Not an Elegy for F.
Blue Late Elegy for R.
The Clock on the Tower in Hà Nội
Mr. O’s Peach Tree
Her Discontent like Lava Soap Burns in the Eyes
A Small Song for Immigrants
The Failure of Cognitive Therapy on April 26, 2015
For Steven, Boone School, 1956
Song of H.
Kokura Bar
Thinking About the Chinese Poet
My When I Have Fears
Crazy with His Anguish and Dumb with Grief
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Colophon
Our schemes are so fragile a fire
begins mincing childishly through
the backstreets, through our fingers
and we’ll never forget;
the whole world is a library of fire
and we’ll never get out of it …
—James Tate
Against Forgetting (Two)
I didn’t remember where to start my life.
If you could translate the screams of brain cells under duress
it would be deafening,
like a waterfall of nails down the blackboard.
I thought of this in the fourth grade.
I figured out that words meant exactly what they said, and at the same time
meant nothing at all. School
was downhill for me
from then on
Part One
THE ELEPHANT GIFT IN THE ROOM
Sun refuses the last nanosecond before night;
stars explode in your cold head—old, nostalgic bombs and rockets, classic
mortar rounds—
but no one understands, and no one hears you speak, and no one even sees
you
standing there in your sixty-two years, soldier.
