One of My Best Friends (iii)

From poet David Connolly of the 11th Armored Cavalry

Hey look. The poet included that poem in his collection, Lost in America.

Look at that. It is the only poem of 50 centered on its page. 43 others are left-justified, 5 in paragraphs of prose, and 1 antiphonally by stanza in 2 left-justified columns resolved with a centered final stanza

whose 4 lines shorten to suggest the area of a rough isosceles triangle, hypotenuse on top like a woman’s pubic thatch. In any case, a colophon, designed. The whole book is a work of unstated design.

Poetry. You have to listen to it, look at it, read it, speak it, think it. You could miss that. The poems of this book are anecdotish, joking, but from a man you don’t meet every day.

Again, the poet centered this 1 entire poem One of My Best Friends only. The previous publication in a journal left-justified it. Why change only that, and why change only this 1 of 44 poems of exactly 1 page, where centering any 1 would have looked just as distinctive?

Why not instead the first poem of the collection, the 1 poem printed on a recto, right page with nothing on the left, verso? All The Stars Do Not Spangle, surely the theme of the book,

our pledge of allegiance and our boyhood running into grown men and women on the other side, hard adults, while our grownups were out front shooting citizens. That is what that war and this act of witness are about.

Why center instead this macabre joke about drinking a black man’s water? What shall I make of that?

This was the third Viet Nam letter of 3 so far about One of My Best Friends by David Connolly. We sent the first on July 6, 2022 and the second on September 3, 2022. We have posted 1 only on his poem Thoughts on Monsoon Morning, on July 20, 2022 and on the poem Why I Can’t, on August 3, 2022.

Viet Nam letters respects the property of others under paragraph 107 of United States Code Title 17. If we asked for permission it wouldn’t be criticism. We explain our fair use at length in the letter of September 12, 2022.

The colophon of these Viet Nam letters, directly above, shows the janitor speaking with poet David A. Willson on a Veterans Day.