The Tet offensive is coming to a theater near you.
And if you’re lucky, you won’t have been born
in time to remember the evening news,
the profile of the bone-weary policeman as he raised
his delicate pistol to the head of the skinny Viet Cong,
ragtag hair and checkered shirt and then the camera
staggering over him where he’d fallen, no longer there,
puddle spreading itself through dirt.
A reporter for Le Monde crouches in a watery ditch,
a ball of black smoke lifting from the treetops beyond his head.
His darting eyes and the reel and stammer
of his breathless pitch
giving new meaning to the word ‘objective’.
The dream rolls over in its sleep,
ghostly fingers tally missing limbs,
skinned alive in Asia.
It’s dinner time in Georgetown.
From soup to sherbet, from ching
of crystal to feedback squeal,
a buffet of gasoline and sparks,
locusts on a boycott of the pantry, and the hustlers trolling Rosslyn
glance across the river to the buildings fed by the horse-loud canal.
Three churches, a firehouse, a bread factory,
a chain-link lot for impounded strays.
The fall of Saigon is coming to a theater near you.
And if you’re lucky, you won’t have been born
in time to remember where you were
when the middle-distance camera
caught the NVA tank
smashing through the wrought-iron gates
of the Presidential Palace,
exhaust scattering leaflets and palm fronds,
the smiling gunner sidesaddle on the turret,
a boyish giddy grin as though he couldn’t quite believe it,
after years of telling his younger comrades to believe it.
And to the left of the swiveling barrel,
a civilian in dark pants and short-sleeved white shirt
takes a few steps towards the tank,
then stops as though he’s changed his mind,
turns around and walks offscreen.