Protracted Elegy For Pete

Pete, your body blown apart
there in the Vietnamese jungle

while I read Americo Paredes,
you with a pistol in your hands.

Two of your fingers
quivering in the mud,

next to the smoking scalp
of Tommy, the black kid from Mississippi.

One of your lips
lying next to hot shrapnel

while I kissed a Chicana’s lips
at Pioneers Park,

whose name survived in my memory
for a decade, now gone,

but, remnants of you, Pete,
float above the page to this day,

expand and grow heavy
crushing me against the earth,

leaving only the scant wiggle room
I must make use of to escape.