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    Among Elms, in Ambush
    Among Elms, in Ambush
    Among Elms, in Ambush
    Ebook145 pages1 hour

    Among Elms, in Ambush

    By Bruce Weigl

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    About this ebook

    This powerful new work by Bruce Weigl follows the celebrated poet and Vietnam War veteran as he explores combat, survival, and PTSD in brief prose vignettes.

    In compact, transcendent, and poetic prose, Bruce Weigl chronicles somber observations on the present day alongside painful memories of the war. Reflections on school shootings and the lightning-fast spread of news in the 21st century are set alongside elegies for forgotten soldiers and the lifelong struggle of waiting for the trauma of war to fade. Haunting and nuanced, Among Elms, in Ambush carries readers through meditations and medications, past the shapes of figures in the dark rice fields of Viet Nam and the milkweed pods in the frost-covered fields of Ohio, toward a hard-won determination to survive.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBOA Editions Ltd.
    Release dateSep 14, 2021
    ISBN9781950774425
    Among Elms, in Ambush
    Author

    Bruce Weigl

    The author of over twenty books of poetry, translations and essays, Bruce Weigl’s most recent collection, The Abundance of Nothing, was a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He has won the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, the Robert Creeley Award, The Cleveland Arts Prize, The Tu Do Chien Kien Award from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, fellowships at Breadloaf and Yaddo, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2018, he was awarded the “Premiul Tudor Arghezi Prize” from the National Museum of Literature of Romania. Weigl’s poetry, essays, articles, reviews and translations have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harvard Review, Harpers, and elsewhere. His poetry has been translated into Romanian, Spanish, Vietnamese, Chinese, Bulgarian, Japanese, Korean and Serbian. He lives in Oberlin, OH.

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      Book preview

      Among Elms, in Ambush - Bruce Weigl

      Part I:

      The Problem with Shapes in the Night Trees

      Tale of the Tortoise

      I don’t know how the tortoise got in through the fence and past the neighborhood dogs that run loose once the sun is down, but I found her near a nest of her eggs where the garden had already begun to turn to autumn. It seemed she’d found a home there, and who was I to tell her otherwise, so I brought her straw to make a better bed, and food I never saw her eat but that disappeared from the tin plate where I put it. I don’t remember now how long it took, but she kept the eggs warm until they hatched, and her many babies scrambled out in every direction until she rounded them up again into her care. Now I have to tell you that there never was a tortoise, only one that I wanted to be there. There never was a fence to crawl under, or neighborhood dogs for someone to step around down the dark alley. There was no dark alley. There was no nest or eggs, no straw, no hope for anything. But I did find a tortoise in my yard one morning where it had laid its eggs in a nest it had made with mowed grass. I don’t know where she came from but perhaps she was a neighbor’s pet, and there was a zoo nearby. I called the police to see if they knew what to do, and they came quickly, and confirmed that it was a tortoise, with eggs. Sometimes you need to tell a story to fill a hole in your mind, or to try and mend something that’s been torn by a violent wave that washed through you once. There was no tortoise, and no policeman. I know, I have to stop doing this. I want you to believe me. It’s all about the story. It’s all we have.

      The Man in the Chair

      The man in the chair is screaming his life away. No one cares that his bathrobe has fallen open, exposing the white skin of old age. No one cares that he’s screaming until the screams float down the hallway, and then out into the night that cares even less.

      The maple trees I’m watching die have so much more freedom in their dying than the man in the chair. Someone who looks like me whispers in his ear that it will be alright, but for now he doesn’t stop screaming, each scream a wave that comes from far away then breaks onto our rocky shore.

      I don’t know if the maple trees know that they are dying. Nothing can be done, so I watch them die and trim the dying branches and carry them away. The man in the chair wants someone to carry him away. He won’t stop screaming in the nursing home where my demented mother keeps her eyes closed but manages a Shut up on her own. This is what a life may come to after all, this is what a life is, and means, and smells and tastes and sounds like.

      According to Loop Quantum Gravity Theory

      Homer gives us a history of his own world. The Iliad shows us fifty days of a ten-year war.

      Don’t forget Thetis, mother of Achilles, or Artemis, sister of Apollo.

      The stories were already old. A thousand years before Christ, the stories were already old, so you might ask, why our need for sacrifice, given how one thing is connected to all other things, and therefore, to everything that you can touch at least.

      The gods are at work in Homer. They punish, and they reign over everyone, and they gave the Greeks a reason to be afraid. What would we call it now, this kind of god, and whom may we blame for the world’s transgressions? Already we have violated even outer space, and the numbers matter, man, the math matters: you take so much out every time, until there’s nothing left.

      All at Once

      I realize that the roses on my hotel desk are not paper as I had thought, but real, their redness blasting through the gloom. Outside,

      the Hà Nội traffic breezes past. Sometimes I don’t know where I am but it’s not a problem really, only a slight deviation from the path. I used to keep a shiny stone in my pocket to hold in my hand at times like this because I thought the stone was always in the world. I was wrong about a lot of things in those days. I want to go back

      to the roses on my desk because the nature of their beauty is almost too much to bear, and they are not paper as I had thought, and the room is not a hole I fell into in the green place, and the bed is not my bunker. I love the mottled leaves, the long stems that prick.

      For Nguyên Mai

      The People Have Spoken and They Are Ugly

      Soon the free zones will emerge, new borders drawn in whatever blood it will take

      so those of a kind can flock together beyond what they fear. You know what I mean; this could happen. The people have spoken, and they are as ugly as the lies that they told to smother freedom, but you can only change yourself to better understand their greed, you can never change the others. This happens in history, this strange swell of ignorance that comes up from some murky place in our hearts when there is a need for blood, and it will last until that need is satisfied.

      The teacher says: secure the raft of life and death, but it’s so hard to act without doing, to walk on paper thin as air, and never tear a single thread.

      The Woman on the Train

      I am waiting for the woman on the train that rolls through ancient mountains towards Lào Cai. She is riding in a sleeper car alone. She is full of many languages, as safe as she could be, her mind a star she let me see. I am waiting for the woman on the train who is tracing the scar on her face with her long fingers. I want to trace that scar which I love, with my lips. I want everything about her inside of me, like the spirit love is, raising me above the loss and sorrow into something else that feels like being free

      to live under the hands of love and understanding, in a simple house with a garden, and a room to sing and dance in, oh my. I’ve almost reached a point of understanding the nothing that I know. I am waiting for the woman on the train that moves closer with every breath, to the thousand-year-old city that waits in the night like a hallelujah of grace, clear as the Buddha’s eyes because of how she is in the world, so much her brave self, so beautiful and strong.

      I Hate to Say This

      When the first responders entered the room of murdered children

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