Keeping Six Words Tumbling in Air

Okay, one more of my poems from Asian American Literature, the textbook edited by Shawn Wong, for the benefit of the UGA students with whom I've been interacting (see the last two posts) and now my own students in our Asian American Literature course (at the University of Northern Iowa) who are about to start discussing my poems in that same textbook.

Vietnam Era Vet


A fragrance remembered is Vietnam —
the acrid odor of gunpowder and tracer fire,
smudgy cooking fires in every hooch, the pungent scent
of nước mắm and water buffalo shit, a father's
acid sweat as he searches for his lost son
in some ville, smoking from an H&I strike — all this was my wish.

I'd look at my class A's in their plastic bag in the closet and wish
sometimes I too had been to the 'Nam.
I remembered basic training at Fort Ord, double timing in the sun
to the range. "Ready on the left! Ready on the right! Fire
at will!" Late nights in the latrine, I wrote my father
long letters about being afraid I'd be sent

over there. Everyone in the platoon was afraid of being sent,
but not one of us admitted it. "Sure wish
they'd ship me over to that motherfucker,"
we said to each other in the noonday light, "Vietnam —
can't wait. Shoot me a fucking gook or two, fire
mortars all goddamn night." Papa'd write back, "Son,

let God's will be done. Just be a good son.
Just do your job. If they send you, then they send
you. That's all." And I'd lie on my dark bunk and smoke — the fiery
tip of the cigarette curling like a tracer ricochet — wishing
I loved it all. C-rations, the firing range, the memorized Vietnamese
phrases, my leaky shelter half on bivouac. All for Papa.

That was as close as I would get to my father's
war. I'm sure my grandfather called him a good son,
both in the U.S. Army, the Philippine Scouts. Their Vietnam
had been Bataan. When the sergeant would send
my father out on point, did he wish
even for a moment that he hadn't joined up? Did artillery fire

make him cringe in his foxhole? That time he was caught in crossfire,
did he try to will himself into a tree, a rock, a bird? Papa,
I knew only the mortar's crump and whoosh,
the parabolic path reaching up to California sun.
I never knew the shrapnel's white-hot whistle at arc's end.
Two nights ago, I dreamt I was in Vietnam:

a farmer runs for the tree line — I fire a crisp M-60 burst — Vietcong,
for sure, for sure. The LT sends me up to verify. In shimmering sun,
Charlie's face is the one I wash in my helmet. No. It's your face, Papa.

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Journal of American Culture (1993). Reprinted in Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996). Appeared also in Fighting Kite (2007).

Some brief footnotes. In line 6, "H&I" stands for Harrassment and Interdiction: indiscriminate artillery fire at the enemy to break their morale; of course, this procedure caused a great deal of so-called "collateral damage," i.e., injury and death among civilians and noncombatants. Ain't military terminology as fun as a barrel of junkies? In line 7, "class A's" are semi-formal Army uniforms, similar to a suit and tie. A "shelter half" refers to half of a pup tent (line 24); two soldiers would team up to make up a single tent for bivouac or encampment. The Philippine Scouts (line 27) were an elite US Army unit before and during WWII; the Philippine Army was a separate force from the Philippine Scouts. In line 37, an M-60 is a heavy, belt-fed machine gun. Finally, "LT" stands for lieutenant and is pronounced ell-TEE (line 38). With regard to the Wong textbook in particular, there are two errors. The word "is" in the first line was typeset as "in" in the textbook. Also, "nước mắm" is misspelled in the textbook as "nuoe mam," without the diacritics essential in printed Vietnamese.

Let's focus on craft and technique first. The salient point here is that this poem is a sestina. If you don't know this poetic form, the sestina repeats the ending words of each line in the sestets (six-line stanzas) so that they eventually appear at the end of every possible location (the first line of the sestet, the second line, etc.). Then the repeating words (called repetons [REHP-uh-tawns) appear in a three-line stanza (known as an envoi [own-VWAH]), two words per line, one at the end of the line and the other in the middle.

The repetons are re-used in the stanzas in a preset pattern. The matrix below shows the cycling of this particular sestina's repetons — Vietnam, fire, scent, father, son, and wish. I've color-coded the words so you can follow their movement through the stanzas easily.

Stanza 1........ Vietnam  fire  scent  father’s  son  wish

Stanza 2........ wish  'Nam  sun  Fire  father  sent

Stanza 3........ sent  wish  motherfucker  Vietnam  fire  son

Stanza 4........ son  send  fiery  wishing  Vietnamese  Papa

Stanza 5........ father’s  son  Vietnam  send  wish  fire

Stanza 6........ crossfire  Papa  whoosh  sun  arc’s end  Vietnam

Envoi fire Vietcong  sends sun  wash Papa

As you can see, I "cheat" by altering the repetons occasionally (this is pretty common practice among contemporary writers of the sestina). For example, "Vietnam" becomes "'Nam" in stanza 2, "Vietnamese" in stanza 4, and finally "Vietcong" in the envoi. Almost always sestina alterations are done through consonance ("wish" ——> "whoosh" ——> "wash"). I'm pretty proud of how, in stanza 6, the "sent"/"send" sound is rendered by "arc's end" — cool, eh? I'm even more proud (perversely so) of "father" becoming "motherfucker" . . . a kind of literalist double entendre. And there is even a basis here (admittedly distant) in rich consonance: /f/ and /r/ in father and motherfucker, not to mention that the /th/ sound appears in both words. Poetry . . . no, poetics . . . is fun, kids!

Okay, on to content. Many readers misinterpret this poem as being spoken by a grunt in Vietnam, a combat veteran. The central conflict of the poem orbits around the speaker not having gone to Vietnam. In fact the title of the poem is US governmentalese for someone who served in the US armed forces during the war but was not sent to Vietnam. Although this poem uses many autobiographical details from my own life, this speaker is a persona, not me at all. I personally don't feel this way about not having been sent to Vietnam; in real life, my father, even though he was quite the proponent for Army and veteran service, did not want me to fight in that war because he felt the war in Vietnam was wrong.

So why did I write the poem? I had read and was wowed by a story titled "The Persistence of Memory" by Walter Howerton, Jr. (from an anthology called The Perimeter of Light). Howerton's excellent story focused on a Vietnam-vet wannabe driven by a deep need to connect with his WWII-vet father, now dead, who had condemned him for being an anti-war activist during the Vietnam war. After reading this bravura story, I wondered if I could write something similar using elements from my own life. So essentially "Vietnam Era Vet" is an imitation that ultimately transcends imitation. At least I hope so.

There is one final concern to air. In my last post I talked about my decision to revise "Alan Valeriano Sees a Lynch Mob" by replacing the n-word with two other alternatives. The same issue surfaces here. What about the word "gook" in the third stanza? I would assert that the "g-word" is necessary here to convey the devil-may-care language and 'tude put on by young soldiers; at the same time, in terms of poetics, "gook" carries the /oo/ assonance in "shoot" and "two" . . . as well as the /k/ consonance in "can't" and "fucking." I suppose you might say I'm contradicting myself. Well, I would have to stand with Whitman then: "Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." Amen.

NOTE: I have intentionally not included any visual images in this blog post. We get too many images of war as it is. Blank space, in writing (and in life), has many virtues.

I would also like to offer my apologies to color-blind people who probably had a hard time with the color-coded matrix above. I wish there was another way to do that kind of diagramming without leaving you out.

Dragonfly (page 6)

Okay, back to the serializing of Dragonfly. And, to continue the insect connection, as in my recent beetle-on-a-string theme, this time we focus on the dragonfly. This poem is in fact the title piece of the collection.

Miraculous Dragonfly Tutubi Milagrosa — a Tagalog phrase emblazoned across this sack of jasmine rice, also in Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Laotian, English, and Thai: a concert of tongues, scripts, pictographs. But the crudely drawn dragonfly cruising the names seems hardly a friendly miracle: metallic globes for eyes, skeletal legs from a giant mosquito, hairy carapace like some gene-fused nightmare from a low-budget movie. Abdomen shaped like a missile — a penile sting. Not gossamer wings but helicopter blades: Cobra chopper streaking over silky jungle mist hovers, cybernetic killer machine poised on a stream of fire, molten metal. No. Dragonfly out of my childhood is delicate, a four-year-old's handspan from wingtip to wingtip. Almost sunset near the Rizal monument in Manila's Luneta Park — cicadas in full choir, singing a canticle. A little boy in khaki shorts, a scrape on one knee, stands still then takes a step like a tightrope walker in line with the slender tail of a jade and ultramarine dragonfly. The boy's gaze, his whole being, funneled into fingertip and thumb. For a moment, a small universe of utter beauty and grace in his hand, my hand — intricate shimmer of wings, the eyes iridescent jewels. Page 6 NOTE: Image sources at right, from top to bottom: (1) my wife Mary Ann Blue Gotera's artwork for the cover of the original publication of Dragonfly; (2) a Cobra helicopter firing a missile, from Wikipedia; (3) a photograph by Pablo Yáñez, from his wonderful website www.modernstills.com; (4) a photograph by Judy of the Woods (browse her interesting website on how to carry on a sustainable life at www.judyofthewoods.net); (5) a photograph by Darrin O'Brien (check out his photostream on flickr). Many thanks to these lovely people for giving me permission to use their images in the blog. Do click on the images to see them enlarged; the details of the dragonflies in particular are quite exquisite and not quite as enjoyable in these smaller versions I've posted.

This poem happened because I didn't know something. What I didn't know was what "milagrosa rice" is.

There is indeed a brand of rice called "Dragonfly." I tried really hard to find an image online of the bag it comes in but came up empty-handed; you'll have to take my word for it that the bag is indeed marked with the word dragonfly in several Asian languages. On the bag also is a primitive-looking rendering of said dragonfly, and the whole shebang is labeled "Tutubi Milagrosa." I saw a bag of rice just like this in an Asian food store, and that started up this poem.

Now, tutubi (too-too-BEE) is the word for "dragonfly" in Filipino (or Tagalog, as the poem says), and milagrosa is Spanish for "miraculous" — a word imported wholesale into Filipino. Putting two and two together, then, I thought the rice bag said, "miraculous dragonfly." In fact, the word milagrosa, it turns out, refers to a type of rice, so the bag is quite pedestrian in declaring its contents as tutubi-brand milagrosa rice. Nonetheless, the misunderstanding — the resonant phrase "miraculous dragonfly" — fueled in me a mindstorm of meditation and memory, and this poem is the happy result.

First, a couple of facts. If you read the first installment of my ongoing bio in the blog, you know that I was born in the US but also lived some years as a small child (fact one). This poem is set during that time, just like the poem "Beetle on a String," posted on 1-30-2009.

Fact two. You can catch a dragonfly in your hands. This poem is my most-anthologized poem, and it has appeared in several language-arts textbooks for middle school and grade school; I have also performed this poem for students at various middle schools and grade schools, and this is what kids (and adults, I'm guessing) always want to know: can you catch a dragonfly? And how do you do it?

Look at the pictures of dragonflies above; you'll see that their thorax, the part of their body behind the head is quite bulky, containing the musculature for the wings. Although dragonflies have these gynormous compound eyes and probably have much better peripheral vision than we do, I don't think they can see behind themselves. That bulgy thorax gets in the way, like a bulky backpack. Now, I haven't checked with an entomologist on this, but I'm pretty sure I'm dead on here.

So, find a dragonfly that's landed; line yourself up with the tail, so you're directly behind the insect; then sidle up and grip the dragonfly by its tail between thumb and forefinger, ever so gently of course. Now this makes dragonflies really mad, but just hold on. I learned recently that the safest way to hold a dragonfly, so you don't harm it and it doesn't harm itself thrashing, is to bring the wings together above the insect and use them as a kind of handle. The bottom picture above demonstrates how to do that.

Try this out the next time you're near dragonflies; you'll be amazed at how easy it is. But of course, do let the dragonflies go. Don't keep them in a jar and try to feed them plant stuff. They are carnivores and must catch their prey, other insects, on the wing. Even if you put insects in the jar with them, they won't be able to catch them because they have to do it while flying. So don't keep them very long. In fact, it's best to let them go right away.

Fact three. (And this is a confession.) When Mary Ann needed a dragonfly for a model when she was working on the book cover, I went out and caught one. (She didn't actually think it could be done; who says you can't learn practical facts from poems?) We kept it in a jar and tried to feed it. But no go. It died, alas. So I know whereof I speak from actual experience. And my penance is to tell people not to keep dragonflies. Besides, here's a little fact that might intrigue you. The dragonfly forms a cage with its legs and uses it to scoop and trap other flying insects. That's why it can't catch another insect inside a jar, not enough room to get up some speed.

By the way, there's a cool story (fact four) behind Mary Ann's dragonfly illustration for the cover (top image above). She spent a summer drawing dragonfly after dragonfly and although they were wonderful renderings, I thought, Mary Ann was never satisfied. One day, she ripped a dragonfly shape out of white construction paper. She liked it okay, but the color seemed wrong. So Mary Ann pasted it down on another sheet of paper and painted the dragonfly black. After she let the black dry, she lifted up the dragonfly and the black part of the image above was what was underneath, on the throwaway sheet. Mary Ann simply added the turquoise accents, and there it was.

Okay, enough with the facts. "Just the facts, ma'am." Oh, wait, I wanted to add about Mary Ann's art experience that I just love how accident and serendipity can be such important aspects of art; another way to say it is that art can often be a gift to the artist. From the universe, from God, from whatever greater benevolent force you may believe in. And we, the artists, are just a conduit for that grace.

Changing gears. I'm teaching a course in Beginning Poetry Writing right now, and we're at that inevitable point in class when (some of) the students assert that a writer can be universal, can reach the widest audience, by being vague and ambiguous. The argument goes like this: readers won't identify with one's specific detail because it will contradict their own detail, their own memories, so one ought to write generally in order that readers can inject their own feelings into the poem. Nothing could be further from the truth. The poet must provide her own concreteness, and write those details out of her own life so that they glisten and scintillate with her own experience and vision; readers find joy in those specifics, feel that they are in capable hands, and trust the poet to "bring it." Ironically, it is at moments like this that readers bring in their own details, noting how they resonate with the specifics the poet has laid out.

I hope you can see this dynamic at work in this poem. Note in the second stanza the details of "metallic globes for eyes, / skeletal legs from a giant mosquito, hairy carapace / like some gene-fused nightmare from a low-budget movie"; as a child, I was enthralled by those old black and white 1950s movies filled with monsters inevitably produced by atomic radiation, for example, the movie The Fly starring David Hedison (later remade with Jeff Goldblum as the mad, but loveable, scientist). Comic books too were full of that stuff: the Hulk erupting periodically from scientist David Banner who had been exposed to radiation from the gamma bomb he had designed. (These 50s and 60s "morality plays" are, for my money, related to guilt about atomic holocaust, but that's a story for another blog entry.) My point here is that these insect/robot/cyborg details are specific to my own pop-culture interests, but they surely intersect with similar C-movie details gleaned by everyone from Saturday matinees and late-night TV.

Ditto with the war vs. nature stuff in stanza three: "silky jungle mist" vis-à-vis "cybernetic / killer machine." For people of my generation, this screams Vietnam. But, since the twentieth century and evidently the twenty-first too are times of wars and wars, this material should reverberate for most readers: the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, the current war in Iraq, etc. (And those are just the American ones.)

In the second half of the poem, there are details that are more closely related to the specifics of my own life: "a four-year-old's handspan from wingtip to wingtip"; "the Rizal monument" (José Rizal is the national hero of the Philippines, so there are both personal and national references in this passage); "cicadas." And much more specific and personal: "khaki shorts, a scrape on one knee." These details are designed specifically to ground the poem (and the reader, of course) in verisimilitude, in an apparent reality, to help them feel as if they are "there." Although perhaps someone may not have worn khaki shorts, everyone will have had abrasions and bruises. So a common humanity is invoked by these small details.

In the final stanza, I start to include general ideas, notions that aren't concrete: "his whole being," "a small universe," and "utter beauty and grace." But notice that this is one stanza out of six, and the earlier five act as contextualizing ballast: all the Asian languages mentioned in the opening stanza, for instance. This transition from the specific to the general allows the speaker then to reveal: "his hand, my hand." And the last line returns us to specific detail: "intricate shimmer of wings, the eyes iridescent jewels."

As we used to say in poetry workshops of the 70s and 80s, the poem earns the right to use large, universal concepts by anchoring the poem first in concrete detail and then re-anchoring the poem at the end with concrete detail.

Once again, though, let me remind you that the writer is never the best source about his or her own writing. So I would love to hear what you think about all this; leave me a comment below. Or if you have questions, ask away. Thanks. I hope you are having a truly marvelous day today.

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Autobiography (1.0)

From time to time, I am contacted by students or researchers who are studying my poetry or fiction, and they often ask questions about my life. So I am going to give a brief bio here for those students and others who may be interested.

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On June 20, 1952, I was born Vicente Ferrer Gotera in the NCO Club at the Presidio of San Francisco. Well, that's not exactly true. That date is right but the building was the Obstetrics Clinic of Letterman Army Hospital . . . only years later would it become the NCO club, a bar and restaurant for non-commissioned officers, sergeants and so on.

My parents were both Filipino American immigrants to the US: Martin Avila Gotera and Candida Fajardo Gotera. My father would eventually become a lawyer and my mother was already an MD when I was born (I believe).

I was born in a US Army hospital because my father was a retired Army officer, a second lieutenant who received a battlefield commission, meaning he had performed some feat of extraordinary leadership while in combat . . . what that feat was, I don't know. Martin was a naturalized American citizen because of his service in the US Army during WWII, a member of the elite Philippine Scouts, survivor of the Bataan Death March and a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.

After receiving medical care in the US for combat fatigue in 1946, Martin went back to the Philippines but had to return periodically to the US to re-establish residency in order not to forfeit his naturalized US citzenship. When he met Candida he was in San Francisco on one of those residency trips.

My mother was in the US because she had gone to Stanford University for her medical training (all or part, I’m not certain about). Dr. Fajardo's specialty was pediatrics, and she practiced medicine in the Philippines some time later . . . more on that below.

In 1951, Martin met Candida Fajardo in the basement of a downtown San Francisco bank. He had heard women's voices speaking Tagalog and followed their refreshing lilts until he saw Candida (nicknamed Dading) with her sister Clara. They were immediately attracted to one another, though Clara said, "Watch out for that one — he’s trouble."

Well, I guess he was trouble . . . Martin was already married. His wife Carolina Matsumura Gotera had stayed behind in Manila with their two sons Gabriel (nicknamed Angel) and Jose (nicknamed Pepito). Martin obtained a Mexican divorce from Carolina in order to court and marry Candida. After their marriage in October 1951, Martin and Candida lived in San Francisco, where I spent my early life.

I'm not sure what year my parents moved to the Philippines, I think for my father to study for his law degree, which he earned from the University of the Philippines, I believe. My mother practiced medicine during this period. And to some degree, they had to "lay low" because divorce was not legal in the Philippines and so my father was technically in violation of the law for having married my mom. In the eyes of the law, he would have been considered a bigamist.

In Manila, I went to St. Theresa's School for kindergarten and then to San Sebastian College for first through third grade. It was during first (or maybe second) grade that I wrote my first poem. My father and I were on a ferry boat crossing Manila Bay (I believe); it was early morning, and I distinctly remember noticing the sun, how bright it was and round. The poem was written in quatrains, I recall, rhyming abcb . . . it might have been 12 lines, or 16. I don't have a copy of this poem, alas, but I do recall that it was published in some kind of school newsletter. If anyone reading this is willing to do the detective work to find the appropriate San Sebastian newsletter from probably 1959 or 1960, I would be forever beholden.

In the meantime, my father was having professional trouble; the Philippines had enacted a law preventing American citizens from practicing law there, presumably because American lawyers who had trouble passing the bar in the US would go to the Philippines to practice. This left my father in a lurch because he didn't want to give up his American citizenship.

We moved to San Francisco in May 1962. I was nine years old. And I went to St. Agnes School for fourth through eighth grade. It was during this time that I started to go by the name "Vince"; I found that so many people had trouble with my given name "Vicente," wanting to put an "n" between the "i" and the "c." I later went to St. Ignatius High School, which became St. Ignatius College Preparatory while I was a student there.

My mother did not practice medicine after we moved back to the US. And neither did my father practice law . . . he didn’t want to go back to law school to study American law. He would say, "I'm already a lawyer!" And he didn’t allow my mother to practice as a doctor either, because he couldn't practice his profession. I remember my mother occasionally suggesting, because of our ongoing financial difficulties, "Well, then, I'll work as a medical technician." And my father would say, "You can’t do that; you're a doctor!" Several catch-22's there.

In late 1970 or early 1971, I had some early literary successes. I won a city-wide essay contest for high-school students, though I can't recall now what that prize was called. That essay was published in the Philippine News, an expatriate (anti-Marcos) newspaper based in San Francisco, along with four or five poems. I was fortunate to have really excellent English teachers at Saint Ignatius . . . "S. I." we called the school, for example, in the football stadium: "WE ARE  . . .  S. I.  . . .  WE ARE  . . .  S. I."

I particularly thank Mr. Bob Grady (now Fr. Grady) for his creative writing assignments in junior and senior English. Write a story like Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio. Imitate an e. e. cummings poem. And just straight-out creative writing prompts. I remember in particular one classmate who turned in the lyrics to "Cloud Nine" by the Temptations and got an A. For the most part, though, most of us wrote those poems and stories and plays in serious fashion for Mr. Grady, and I learned a tremendous amount in his classes.

During my high school years, also, I played lead guitar in several rock bands that gigged at teen club and high school dances across San Francisco. I remember a couple of band names: Doomsday Refreshment Committee, Change of Heart, and Peace of Mind come immediately to mind. My guitar god was Carlos Santana, and I remember playing the solos on his records over and over, working them out note by note, riff by riff, chord by chord.

When I became of draft age, my number in the draft lottery was 30. This meant that we men born on June 20 would be drafted 30th during the year to come. Really, 30 was a terrible number if you didn’t want to be drafted; consider that there were 336 birthdays that got lower priority.

I entered Stanford University in 1971 with that 30 hanging over my head. And that was also the year that student deferments were abolished. So . . . double whammy.

And there was another factor involved. My girlfriend, Ivania Velez, was pregnant. We married in January 1972. I needed a job to support the two of us and the baby that was on the way. I left college in March 1972 and enlisted in the Army in April 1972.

In June 1972, just a few days before I turned 20, my first child was born: Martin Adan Gotera. I was in Basic Training at the time at Fort Ord, not far away from San Francisco, and so fortunately I was able to be present for Ivon’s labor and Marty’s birth. I remember that was a gala occasion. My father, who wrote a column titled "Of This and Such" for the Philippine News, really outdid himself with a very joyful and enthusiastic announcement of Marty’s birth.

My Army service was fairly uneventful. It was wartime . . . the Vietnam war was still going on, but I was luckily never sent to Vietnam. My job in the service was Military Pay Clerk, and I was stationed at Fort Ord again. After Basic Training, I was sent to Indiana for advanced training and then assigned back to Fort Ord. For the second half of my three-year hitch, I was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco; my mother had developed cancer of the bone marrow, and the Army gave me a compassionate reassignment to the Presidio. I eventually achieved a rank of Specialist Fifth Class, equivalent to a buck sergeant.

When I was discharged from the service in April 1975, I took a job as a civilian employee at the Presidio’s Finance and Accounting Office, where I had worked as a soldier. After a couple of years, I became the Supervisor of the Reserve and National Guard pay division; I remember my own incredulity as I, not even 25, would authorize and sign payrolls worth millions of dollars. It still seems surreal to me now.

In the meantime, on the family front, my mother had grown steadily more ill. Ivon and Marty and I lived with my parents at that time so that Mama could spend as much time as possible with us (especially Marty). In 1976, Mama passed away, having outlived the doctors' estimates of how long she had left to live.

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I'm going to stop there for now, and continue the bio in a later post. At this moment I want to share the elegy I wrote for my mother about a decade or more after she died.

Hospital Thoughts, Last Year and Today


Last Christmas Eve, I woke to see Mama, dead
twelve years, bending over me in that strange bed,

but no, it was just those pale hospital green
walls, the yellow daze of fever. I'm seeing

things, I thought. But it must have been like that
for my father, a woman with blue-black hair in whites

bending over him during morning rounds,
like the Tenente and Cathy in A Farewell to Arms.

Around them—like a 1940s black-
and-white flick—the war. Sirens and ack-ack

guns, Manila covered with a shroud of smoke
again. General MacArthur returning like

an iron bloodhound, the Japanese kneeling by the sea.
When I was nine, that's how I'd wanted it to be.

I didn't want my parents to meet in a bank
in San Francisco, Tagalog words like magnets

drawing them together. But that Florence
Nightingale bedside scene never took place.

Those knotted hospital sheets tight around my chest,
I recalled Mama's cancer. How doctors christened

her a "model" patient. Once a pediatrician,
she had already fingered all their talismans:

chemotherapy, radiation treatment,
her hair falling out, her body shucking off weight.

At Carew and English, Papa and I found
she'd already ordered a shiny cedar coffin.

Now my father lies in a VA ward in
California—when I visit, he is skinny

as a nine-year-old boy, legs like useless sticks.
He speaks of the war, the Bataan death march,

how thin he'd gotten in the concentration camp.
He tells me how he misses Mama sometimes.

More desperately than his hand on my hair, I want
to see my mother in white, next to the window,

the stethoscope gleaming round her neck.
The sun glints in her hair, full and black.

—	Vince Gotera, first appeared in the Seattle Review. Reprinted in Men of Our Time: Male Poetry in Contemporary America (1992).

With regard to my poetics, I would probably highlight my employment of slant rhyme here. First, clearly there are full rhymes: "dead" and "bed," "black" and "ack." There is one instance of pararhyme (or consonantal rhyme, a là Wilfred Owen): "want" and "window." There are also quite acceptable slant rhymes, such as "that" and "whites," or "neck" and "black." But then I also use some very distant rhymes: "rounds" and "arms," "bank" and "magnets," for example. I really wanted quite a bit of diversity in the rhyming. And also my trademark "roughed-up" pentameter.

Basically, I wanted couplets that any formalist could recognize as rhymed couplets but which proponents of free verse would think was free verse. I wanted the best of both worlds in what was at that time, in the 1980s, an armed-camp atmosphere between the free-verse poets and the so-called neoformalists. As in so many contexts, I played at being the joker, the wild card.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

My father was a laconic man. I don't mean to say that he didn't talk much . . . he didn't give off an air of rudeness or mystery, as Webster's defines "laconic." He talked plenty; he held his own in conversations. What I mean to say is that my father didn't tell something unless he saw a need for it to be told.

Here's a classic example: one time when I was a teenager, a young man knocked on our door and asked to see my dad. I showed him into the living room and went to get Papa. Who then peeked into the living room and hustled me into the dining room, where he whispered in my ear, "That's your brother." I had no inkling that I had a brother.

It turns out my father had been married to another woman before Mama and had two sons from that marriage . . . our visitor was the younger of these two, Pepito. The older was Angel, a name that requires a story I'll tell another time. Hmmm. I guess I can be a little laconic too.

Here's a poem about my brother Pepito, another Gotera who was a soldier in the US Army.

A Soldier’s Letter To my brother:     When I was fifteen, you surfaced out of the San Francisco night, a stranger knocking on our door. Your family a mystery kept from me, a wife and kids from another face in my father's secret mirror. You stayed with us for two or three nights, a dark and glum presence, brooding at the dinner table. Mama didn't seem shocked at all. Those nights we lay in my room, listening to the Sopwith Camel and the Stones on KFRC, and you softly crooned the melody. Once you asked who Jesus was — why did we light candles to him? At the end of the week, Papa drove you to the Army Recruiting Station. And Vietnam swallowed you whole. No news for six months, and then your letter came. The one in which you threatened   to disembowel Papa with your bayonet,   to blow him away with steel shot from a Claymore,   to lock and load your M-16, then shoot him dead.     Dead for leaving you and your Mom alone in Manila. Where she took you and your brother down to the bay and hugged you tearfully until she saw St. Jude floating over the water. A miracle. Your lives saved. And now, in the 'Nam, your life had again been spared by the vision in air of a woman in a white ao dai. You jerked your head back in surprise, and the sniper's bullet lopped off a leaf where your face had been. And so you believed your hophead's life was sacred. No rocket, no mortar round could pierce the armor of revenge, the righteous shield of vengeance. I vowed to make myself strong, to take taekwon-do lessons, to save my father's life when you rotated home. But moments pass like buckshot, and when you finally landed at Oakland, you went on back to LA, without stopping again at our door. The letter — a reefer fantasy. Today, the letter forgotten, you live in our father's house, alternating between gay bars on Castro and the VA hospital psych ward. Rather than bullets or a C-4 explosion, you pay our father rent from your disability check — the proceeds of your post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. The last time we saw each other, you showed Mary Ann your saints, like a pack of cards. "This picture is St. Blaise &mdash he saves you from choking on chicken bones. And here's St. Anthony. I use him to find lost things." You called the pictures your "directory to heaven." Nights, I see you in my mind, bowing before a small Buddhist altar, lighting sticks of incense, chanting with your eyes closed. You're thinking back to velvet times in Manila, when you were a teenage singer on TV, crooning love songs under a blue spot. —  Vince Gotera, from Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995). Also appeared in Ghost Wars (2003).

I don't know what to add to this story. Pepito had indeed been a teenage singer in Manila . . . and I don't know much more than that. He was quite a colorful fellow, very eccentric in weird ways. A gay man who sometimes pretended not to be though he made it eminently clear at other times. One day he would be a drag queen, a Diana Ross knock-off, and the next day he would say, "You should find me a wife, a nice Midwestern girl." He was sometimes a recovering drug addict, and at other times just a straight-out drug addict. I think he was a small-time drug pusher as well. He is no longer with us . . . he died violently, stabbed on some San Francisco street. The police never uncovered who done it.

About the poem as a poem: I worked pretty hard on lineation. A mix of end-stops and enjambment . . . creating (I hope) a meld of both hurry as well as suspense at different points. In the fourth stanza, I use indentation and a reverse drop line to set off and emphasize the word "dead." Which is then repeated immediately after. I'm giving you precious little here . . . basically I guess I just don't know much about this poem. Sorry.

I would appreciate some feedback about what you think is going on here. If you feel like it, leave me a comment, please. Not a remark for potential revision, because as far as I'm concerned the poem is done and I'm not interested in reworking it. I'm just curious about how people read it &mdash how you read it. And how you make sense of the poetics of this particular poem.

When I wrote "A Soldier's Letter," probably almost two decades ago, Pepito was still alive though we were hardly ever in touch. And now, after he has died, I realize that this poem was, in many ways, already my elegy for him. Rest in peace, Jose Pater Gotera. Rest in peace, my brother.