Here I sit, dumbfounded, at the old French jail in Hanoi
with a strain of mosquito buzzing in my ear.
Here they don't peel back fingernails or burn off your balls --
but it's just six years of no sleep, no dreams.
With dysentery, I sit most of the day
on a rice pot, covered with leeches, half-detached
from my physical body. If only I could finish
this letter to you, or say what I must to be released.
I can't identify this war at all, the brutality
of the conquerors, the empty theater of the idealists --
all I know is there's a lake outside, lovely, blue,
maybe there are swans. I could sit and sip iced tea,
tease a tree shrew who nibbles at red peppers, pull
at tresses in a girl's hair, read to her from my phrasebook,
far, car, star... or simply sing. Maybe not come home.
Don't ask me to remember the strafing and the napalm,
my racketing down to the forest floor, or the sleek
sweptback wings moving off through sonic boom.
No, now it's only this spider and me in our Shangri-La,
no diary, no condemnations, I don't even think I can write
to you and ask Will you come? When will I be free?

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