for Neal D. Courtney, Cambodia 1969-70

Years before his bedridden blindness,
my sobriety,
there was day-tripping
through the National Mall’s
gazing pool—The Three Soldiers—
an embossed flask
clanging
against my father’s belt buckle.
He poured shot after shot
of off-brand bourbon into cut-glass,

chain-smoked Chesterfield’s, rolled spliffs,
offering me a swallow,

a medicinal hit
from the same ashen hand
that formed his fist
that christened drywall,
my mother’s lip.
Fever wasn’t the only thing to break
in Cambodia,
in roadside ditches dark
as umbilical blood.
There was the slug fired from the angel-end
of his rifle,
ripping through eucalyptus leaves.
There was him,

left in tourniquet grass
to shepherd home our dead.
Now, when he sits
on the crag and tells me of the world’s
original fire,
how black wasps carouselled
the tongues of bloated bison,
I believe him.
No maggot went unfed.