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Wendy Scott
​​

At the End of Vietnam

                for my father

You passed from bed to bed
among soldiers, POW's, Hmong,
checked for gangrene, sepsis,
peeled bandages from burns,
scrubbed away charred skin,

shone light in corneas darkened
by coronas of white fire.
You were stabilized, not whole,
like them. You floated,
like the rays between objects.

From your orbit, strange as Pluto’s,
almost distant enough
for this—to walk
one cordoned bed to the next.

Thousands lifted
in the promise of air: Hanoi to Manila,
Pearl Harbor to this gym in Sacramento
where beds in concentric circles
scraped paint from floorboards.

Hoops and bleachers hovered above
shifting, curses, morphine’s uncoupling.
Youheld ground while drifting, wrote
of bike tours, massesof wildflowers, birds,

​never spoke of your work.
Like those soldiers suspended
in memories of flame, you fought
for a square inch of ground,
scrambled to land, reach earth.

​


​Wendy Scott’s first book of poems, Soon I Will Build an Ark, was published by Main Street Rag in 2014. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Harpur Palate, Cobalt, and Fourth River, among others. She is a reader for the Pittsburgh Poetry Review and has an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh. She has taught creative writing and composition in a variety of settings, including universities, elementary schools, and halfway houses, and has worked as a social worker, a legal assistant, and a union foodservice worker, among other jobs.

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