Peter Balakian - Saigon / New Jersey

It was russet light, Orchard Lane,
white-shingle colonials
and the ch ch of the sprinklers,
small rainbows in twilight,
the fabric smell
of funeral parlor on us
From a fence we fell
to the fairway on all fours,
a sky of purple berries,
my hand swollen from a doubleheader,
Ho Chi Minh, a tin sound in the air.
A brash oak casket
was less than the absence
of your brother's arm still clear
as the ghostly rubber of the mound.
Your Heaven Scent heavy
as we slid into the trap,
and the white number of the flag
grew incandescent. You who loved
the classics said Orion's eyes
were wild birds against pure black,
then our tongues failed
and we burned into each other. 

I probably mentioned this already, but I recently got back from a family trip to Vietnam. We hit Ho Chi Minh City, Nha Trang and Da Lat. It was honestly an amazing trip and an amazing country. There’s a weird cognitive dissonance that happens when you’re standing in the middle of Saigon, absorbing that humid, neon-lit energy and trying to compare it to the ektachrome images of war that lives in the American psyche. I wasn’t even close to a thought during the Vietnam War. My mother had only just become a teenager but her older brothers were of draft age. My uncle Freddy served in the Navy during the war, following in the footsteps of my WWII Navy vet grandfather. My uncle John was eligible for the 1972 draft but luckily his birthday wasn’t called. He tells a story about mistaking the March 9th lottery pull for March 7th and making the decision that he’d rather go to jail than to war before realizing he’d dodged a bullet. He also tells stories about friends from the neighborhood who weren’t as lucky. So I grew up with this idea of Vietnam as a place where the government sent unlucky young men to kill, die and get addicted. It all feels particularly current with the war mongering cabinet that we have at the helm now, but I digress. While I was poking around my shelves this week, I found Peter Balakian’s 1996 collection Dyer’s Thistle and landed on “Saigon / New Jersey” which felt somehow more impactful than any previous reading I can remember.

Balakian sets the scene of suburban sprawl with a set of L sounds that will come to carry the first half of the poem. "It was russet light, Orchard Lane,/ white-shingle colonials” Go ahead and check out all of the L’s that appear in the first half of the poem. They’re the sound tying everything together. The opening four lines are smooth and easy, painting something damn near idyllic. Though a reread after will inject some menace into the onomatopoeic stutter of ch ch. It’s the sound of sprinklers, yeah, but also the sound of helicopter blades, and Balakian uses it to artfully slip the machinery of war into the small-town paradise. It also precedes the introduction of death. The L’s are still there, so the sonic flow isn’t interrupted, but cognitive one certainly is. This line and it’s reliance on the olfactory is going to come back later in the poem, so it works well that he positioned it to be this sort of hiccup in the flow of images. The flurry of f’s shifts our placement. The speaker has moved to a golf course and they’re not supposed to be there. This is the reckless abandon of youth, and it is reinforced by the description of “my hand swollen from a doubleheader”

Did that line catch your eye and ear immediately also? It might be because it’s trochaic pentameter, famous for its use in Macbeth to set the witches’ ominous words apart. Balakian uses them similarly, setting the stage for the twist that comes in the follow-up line. “Ho Chi Minh, a tin sound in the air.” Couple of things about this particular line The anapestic trimeter combined with the sharpness of the i sounds, the rapid internal rhyme, the first full stop punctuation and the sole isolated line in the poem create a harsh pivot point. That’s all to say nothing about the fact that the poem was titled Saigon but this line leads with Ho Chi Minh.

Shit gets real after that. “A brash oak casket/ was less than the absence/ of your brother’s arm still clear/ as the ghostly rubber of the mound.” Its a heavy and convoluted sentence that runs on like a deluge of raw emotion. We have a fully painted picture now, with the revelation of a dead brother and a connection between the speaker and the other member of the “us” introduced earlier in the poem. The timing of the line, immediately after the introduction of Vietnam, reminds us that war a world away can not be escaped. The ghostly rubber of the mound becomes a memorial to a lost teammate and sibling.

Balakian brings back smells, this time with the sort of dark humor as he describes the companion’s perfume. If you’re not familiar with it, Heaven Scent falls into the ranks of Drakkar Noir, Cool Water and Axe body spray as the scent of a generation. The speaker is here with a female friend, and they are sliding into the sand trap. There’s great wordplay here, between the call back to the funeral parlor and the use of golf course features to paint the grief landscape. One of the myths of Orion has him blinded, and by turning the hunter’s eyes into “wild birds” she is giving a measure of beauty to the void. The poem ends on this sentiment of trying to make sense of the senseless, and they are left "burning into each other," a phrase that carries bizarre combined dual heat of teenage passion and war.