Returning after Our War

1. Saigon

    The other night, I went with friends to see the Saigon River where it loops past the venerable Majestic Hotel still standing on the riverbank at the end of the modernized, old downtown. From the hotel's top floor balcony we looked across to the Nhà Bè side from where, back in the American days, rockets were sometimes launched at the city from the mangrove swamps across the way. We stood awhile saying nothing just watching the boats chugging slowly behind dim bow lights as a full moon floated above the river. 

    During the war, the street behind the Majestic was—architecturally speaking—still a colonial avenue of small shops, GI bars, cafés, Maxim's nightclub (still there), and green-shuttered appartements with yellow, stuccoed walls leaking blotches of mildew. Now it's a dazzle of luxury hotels and skyscrapers. Downtown Saigon is nearly unrecognizable but, every now and then, my taxi would turn a corner, stirring up a distant encounter... an argument in a government ministry, a flower market where I once bought a pair of finches, or simply our corner cigarette stall where a gold-toothed old lady sold Marlboros tapped up with marijuana. 

    Behind the Majestic, the old Graham Greene apartment is gone, though one remembers the man who prepared Greene's opium, still climbing the creaky wooden steps into the early '70s to serve Americans with his valise of popes. Now, after many re-inventions, it's become a garish complex of glass and metal called "Katina" as the global imperium changed hands over the decades and the Rue Catinat became Tụ' Do or Freedom Street, and then, after our war, Đồng Khởi, or Great Uprising, and Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City. 

2. The Opium Pillow

                That night I woke from one of those short deep opium sleeps, ten minutes

                          Graham Greene, The Quiet American

A cool ceramic block, a brick

just larger than one's cheek,

cream-colored, bordered in blue,

a finely crackled glaze, but smooth, 

a hollow bolster on which to lay

one's head before it disappears

in curls of acrid opium fumes

slowly turning in the tropical room

lit by a lampwick's resinous light

snaking shadows up a wall. 

The man who served us with his pipes,

with tarred and practiced hands,

worked a heated wad of rosin

"cooked the color of a cockroach wing"

into the pinhole of the fat pipebowl.

He said, "Draw." One long pull

that drew in combers of smoke rolling

down the lungs like the South China Sea,

crashing on the mind's frail shell

that rattled, then wallowed, and filled with sand.

I woke up to animal groans ...

Down in the stairwell Flynn and Stone

were beating up a young thief

who had broken in to steal their bikes

bucking an M16 agains the kid's ear

then punching him in the stomach with its butt

before they bum-rushed him out the door

doubled over and wheezing for air.

I stammered no in a syllable that rose

like a bubble lifting off the ocean floor. 

Ten days later, they were dead. Flynn

and Stone, who dealt in clarities of force,

who motorcycled out to report the war,

shot at a roadblock on Highway 1. 

Nearly all those Saigon friends are gone now.

Gone like smoke. Like incense.

                for Tom and John Steinbeck, Crystal Eastin Erhart Steinbeck Brown,

                Steve Erhart, Sean Flynn, and Louise and Dana Stone

3. Abandoned House, Saigon

Two swallows fly in a broken window, sweeping under

yellow orchids tumbling from the rotted frame. 

The ghost up there has stopped her complaining

while out in the rain below a tarp, a girl selling soup

squats by the curb slicing tiny hoops of chili,

piling little heaps of red on a white dish. 

Did the ghost upstairs learn English or French?

Where did she intend to go? Why does she linger?

How her lips must burn when her fingers brush them. 

One swallow darts out the darkened window

while over in LA, stuck in traffic, a Vietnamese guy

remembers this street, the vendor, the house lying almost empty. 

4. Hanoi

    One evening, I went for a walk in downtown Hanoi, around its lake surrounded by ancient banyans and plots of tropical plants, with its old temple on an island out in the middle. On weekend evenings, this whole area of the city is blocked off to traffic and everywhere dance groups—tango, ballet, ballroom, rock—dance to loudspeaker recordings or, in some cases, live bands, including a brass band that blares swing to the crowd this evening as one woman sprawls on her back on a nearby bench and sleeps, oblivious to the crowd around her and Duke Ellington's "Take the 'A' Train."

    Farther along, a guy is playing "Despacito" on an electrified, two-string đàn cò, while little kids zip around the opened streets on remote-controlled electric cars, chased after by yappy little dogs pausing only to sniff particularly enticing shoes in the milling crowds ... Several million of them died in the war. 

    But now the streets are packed with strolling families, and I am so glad for them. 

5. Goodbye to the Lake

sleeping in the heart of Hanoi

where the elderly gather at dawn

for tai chi, windmilling their arms

and chatting as they walk the lakeside paths.

Goodbye to the feathery Hoàng Điệp trees

leaning over the water toward the little island

with its shrine for the ancient hero

who gave back the sacred sword. 

And goodbye to the old woman 

sitting zazen every morning by the water's edge

as the lake watches her with its glassine

sentient eye, and sometimes blinks.