O Brother, Where Art Thou?

My father was a laconic man. I don't mean to say that he didn't talk much . . . he didn't give off an air of rudeness or mystery, as Webster's defines "laconic." He talked plenty; he held his own in conversations. What I mean to say is that my father didn't tell something unless he saw a need for it to be told.

Here's a classic example: one time when I was a teenager, a young man knocked on our door and asked to see my dad. I showed him into the living room and went to get Papa. Who then peeked into the living room and hustled me into the dining room, where he whispered in my ear, "That's your brother." I had no inkling that I had a brother.

It turns out my father had been married to another woman before Mama and had two sons from that marriage . . . our visitor was the younger of these two, Pepito. The older was Angel, a name that requires a story I'll tell another time. Hmmm. I guess I can be a little laconic too.

Here's a poem about my brother Pepito, another Gotera who was a soldier in the US Army.

A Soldier’s Letter To my brother:     When I was fifteen, you surfaced out of the San Francisco night, a stranger knocking on our door. Your family a mystery kept from me, a wife and kids from another face in my father's secret mirror. You stayed with us for two or three nights, a dark and glum presence, brooding at the dinner table. Mama didn't seem shocked at all. Those nights we lay in my room, listening to the Sopwith Camel and the Stones on KFRC, and you softly crooned the melody. Once you asked who Jesus was — why did we light candles to him? At the end of the week, Papa drove you to the Army Recruiting Station. And Vietnam swallowed you whole. No news for six months, and then your letter came. The one in which you threatened   to disembowel Papa with your bayonet,   to blow him away with steel shot from a Claymore,   to lock and load your M-16, then shoot him dead.     Dead for leaving you and your Mom alone in Manila. Where she took you and your brother down to the bay and hugged you tearfully until she saw St. Jude floating over the water. A miracle. Your lives saved. And now, in the 'Nam, your life had again been spared by the vision in air of a woman in a white ao dai. You jerked your head back in surprise, and the sniper's bullet lopped off a leaf where your face had been. And so you believed your hophead's life was sacred. No rocket, no mortar round could pierce the armor of revenge, the righteous shield of vengeance. I vowed to make myself strong, to take taekwon-do lessons, to save my father's life when you rotated home. But moments pass like buckshot, and when you finally landed at Oakland, you went on back to LA, without stopping again at our door. The letter — a reefer fantasy. Today, the letter forgotten, you live in our father's house, alternating between gay bars on Castro and the VA hospital psych ward. Rather than bullets or a C-4 explosion, you pay our father rent from your disability check — the proceeds of your post-traumatic stress disorder syndrome. The last time we saw each other, you showed Mary Ann your saints, like a pack of cards. "This picture is St. Blaise &mdash he saves you from choking on chicken bones. And here's St. Anthony. I use him to find lost things." You called the pictures your "directory to heaven." Nights, I see you in my mind, bowing before a small Buddhist altar, lighting sticks of incense, chanting with your eyes closed. You're thinking back to velvet times in Manila, when you were a teenage singer on TV, crooning love songs under a blue spot. —  Vince Gotera, from Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry (1995). Also appeared in Ghost Wars (2003).

I don't know what to add to this story. Pepito had indeed been a teenage singer in Manila . . . and I don't know much more than that. He was quite a colorful fellow, very eccentric in weird ways. A gay man who sometimes pretended not to be though he made it eminently clear at other times. One day he would be a drag queen, a Diana Ross knock-off, and the next day he would say, "You should find me a wife, a nice Midwestern girl." He was sometimes a recovering drug addict, and at other times just a straight-out drug addict. I think he was a small-time drug pusher as well. He is no longer with us . . . he died violently, stabbed on some San Francisco street. The police never uncovered who done it.

About the poem as a poem: I worked pretty hard on lineation. A mix of end-stops and enjambment . . . creating (I hope) a meld of both hurry as well as suspense at different points. In the fourth stanza, I use indentation and a reverse drop line to set off and emphasize the word "dead." Which is then repeated immediately after. I'm giving you precious little here . . . basically I guess I just don't know much about this poem. Sorry.

I would appreciate some feedback about what you think is going on here. If you feel like it, leave me a comment, please. Not a remark for potential revision, because as far as I'm concerned the poem is done and I'm not interested in reworking it. I'm just curious about how people read it &mdash how you read it. And how you make sense of the poetics of this particular poem.

When I wrote "A Soldier's Letter," probably almost two decades ago, Pepito was still alive though we were hardly ever in touch. And now, after he has died, I realize that this poem was, in many ways, already my elegy for him. Rest in peace, Jose Pater Gotera. Rest in peace, my brother.