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Ian Irvine
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Soft Breeze of a Temporal Implosion
After the bus trip:
light-green peaks, rice
plateaus and quiet water
buffalo.
As good a place as any
to reconstruct the countries
of the past.
And there is nothing generalist
about the H'mong children
dancing the narrow street below,
or
the German tourists, pleasantly
drunk on the hotel's upper
floor.
We're sandwiched,
as always,
between the present
and the impalpability of memory –
I muse:
Indonesia 1994:
3,300 rupee to the dollar.
Vietnam 2007:
16,000 dong to the dollar.
This impulse to quantify comforts
the illusion of time
as something solid.
Like the Dao coin I wear as
a necklace, the seller said '1820, Sir.'
Its shape is strange, like
a man without arms, 'an ancient
unit of exchange' before the
coming of the French.
The guide whispered:
'A fake.' But the shape
and the smooth-rust brown surface,
are all that matter to me
at four dollars US.
And the practicalities of spirit –
those women at the pagoda.
At the entrance –
dark rocks and lush
miniature trees.
Inside –
incense-drenched fruit,
a giant cauldron-urn, and
just above the entrance –
multicoloured lanterns.
They loaded us up with free fruit
and hugged our children.
Such calmness
like the men in the white-domed mosques of Java –
bowing, praying whilst
out on the street,
similar densities of
do-it-yourself technology.
I was thirty then, musical, reciprocating
love – and we're still together
walking the town of Sapa,
negotiating maps, as always
will to will,
appreciating the flower-banked
lake, exchanging gifts, raving
about the view, caressing
and enjoying the local food.
A pleasant time-warp, like a lost map
to an old intensity of being
Making love in a grass hut in
central Sumatra – her soft
tanned skin, our
mutual freedom.
And then the day with icing:
as if outside time, and
abnegating the difficulties
of culture shock,
our daughter
her first poem.
Hospital Cave and the Superpower
The old man is 76 years old still wears the khaki hat and shirt of the North Vietnamese army.
He lives less than a kilometre from the place that defined his life. He's fit and stout and funny not at all
like the devil promised us by LBJ. Carries a flashlight and knows every inch of this underground labyrinth.
During the war hundreds of people – soldiers, surgeons and farmers – took shelter in this cave. These days it's deserted, just damp concrete floors and walls beneath an eroded lime-rock ceiling.
When the Americans bombed and bombed the island the locals would crowd in here: what did it feel like waiting for the superpower?
He shows us the 'reception' the doctors' sleeping quarters the medical rooms proper to the left and right of a long corridor, until we arrive at the 'lunch-room'. Here he drops his flashlight, introduces himself again in Vietnamese and asks (commands) us to sing "Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh" "Vietnam-Ho Chi Minh"
He lets me record the performance and suddenly all the war before me, cold chills. Tonnes and tonnes of bombs Agent Orange, vast networks of tunnels in the South, the Tet Offensive, the fall of Saigon.
I've met some Aussie Vets seen them join the Anzac day throng still tentative-as young boys they met their reality match in quiet Vietnamese determined to end colonialism once and for all.
Here, just 70 miles from the Chinese border, I begin to understand.
The digital video is blurry in the cave (all sorts of shadows) as the tourists sing and clap (nervously) the echoes are immense, like 1969, like 200 people singing, like injured farmers, like jets prowling the paradise skies – and before us this old soldier like a phantom, 38 years among ghosts.
If You Eat a Pomegranate
For Thanh Thao
If, after eating a pomegranate underground, you manage to return to the surface it is said that you will have acquired the ability to see ghosts.
Perhaps I've consumed such a fruit by accident. Things have been strange for over a month now – began with my memories of that sunrise crossing the DMZ: The sun coming up and all those people on the roads in the rice paddies, or hanging around the gravestones or houses.
I'm no longer certain who was alive and who was dead. As though another layer of memory-repressed at the time – has invaded the 'realism' of what I thought I remembered.
The problem: supposing all memory collapses like this? What will stop this tendency invading my day time consciousness?
And the train, as I recall it now, moving slowly, far too slowly along the tracks, as though the dead had engineered some kind of deceleration – so I could see them, so I could begin to hear them speak. Though for the moment the protection of glass remains.
Who knows where this is headed.
It is said that a spell three times spoken – especially if by the caster, the recipient, and an unbiased intermediary – is certain to work.
Leaning forward across the table he asked me something in Vietnamese: 'Why do you think I continue to write poetry at my age?'
Despite clear translation
I had no answer, said:
'I don't know your work
well enough to say.'
Eventually he replied in Vietnamese – and after this was translated, I heard: 'For those who are unable to speak' But she wished for further clarity, said: 'He says he writes for those who have no voice … who are no longer with us.'
Startled, I asked – as though struggling to absorb the future – 'For those who died – for the dead?' She nodded, said: 'Yes, for the dead.'
the table went very quiet.