The sentence, you said, must be pared
to the bare bone. This was years after you left New York
for Paris, $40 in your pocket, with ragged duffel bag
of few clothing and early novel manuscripts
you would lose crossing the Atlantic.
You had to leave, you said, after your best friend
jumped from the George Washington Bridge.
You knew you would follow his flight,
would have gone under those dark waters.
You said, to be a black man in America
was to feel perpetual rage
that had to be creatively channeled
or it would consume others
and oneself. I have seen firsthand this rage engulfing
the most unlikely—Demby, 22, husband and father from Philadelphia,
joined a gang of fellow black soldiers, mugging,
vandalizing till turned in by undercover black brother,
sentenced to prison. Demby was my army buddy
who nicknamed me Cool Breeze
for my laidback attitude and originality.
This happened in the U.S. Army,
which I had joined with intuitive urgency:
Being the son of conscripted Hmong SGU soldier
who fought fifteen years under CIA orders, abandoned,
managed to escape across Mekong River
with pocketful of worthless kips, ragged clothing,
to start new life in America as janitor.
I was his seed thrown to foreign ground,
didn’t know how to grow, so I escaped
into the U.S. Army, pared my life to the bare bone
to find the essential, spent years among new brothers
rewriting my life word by word,
sentence by sentence, into a story
I can now understand. As I am now
beginning to understand my brother Demby;
you, Baldwin, his brother; and that wave of young Hmong American men—
my generational brothers who quietly suicided
in stuffy rooms and dusty garages,
and those who lived on
in shade-drawn rooms
or exploded with bats, knifes, guns
in narrow apartment-block alleys.
Yes, our sentences must be pared
to the bare bone.
