Jim Karr

And the grass grew ‘round his brain
                                                          —John Prine

Vietnam filled your head with strange images. A lonesome tiger moaned on a hill. Armless boys and girls played in the village forest. Constellations shone at noon. Showers of fish and crabs poured onto the marketplace at Dien Phu. Undaunted by the surreal, you swore to kill them all until the fog cleared and your arms turned to rubber. You did this; man, woman, child, and beast, no matter. This pleased you. It kept your head clear and your feet on the ground. Then late one evening on the outskirts of Tau Phu, you watched the horizon fall apart like busted stained glass, and you knew you were in trouble and would not live long.

They shipped you back to Slidell after you shivered night and day for six months. Mother and father hovered around like painted puppets. The old shotgun house where you were born and raised was a hall of mirrors and a deafening silence rang in your ears as the television blared and the coffee pot shrieked. Outside the window, all the flowers were yellow and you couldn’t get the taste of cardboard out of your mouth no matter how many fifths of Old Granddad you gulped down.

One night you left a note on the cold kitchen table. You walked the two miles to Lake Pontchartrain barefoot and shirtless. You wore a turquoise jaded cross around your neck, and your hair was long and brown to the middle of your back. How the stars did fall that night on the beach as the shrimping boats pulled their midnight trawls. The smell of creosote pilings was thick in the air. Looking into the sky for the first and last time, all you could think about were horseshoe crabs and how, when you were little, you played with armadillo bones beside a dry ditch for hours. Your father pulled up in his ’56 Lincoln just in time to hear the shot crackle through the salty June wind.

1970