In honor of Memorial Day, this week’s poem brings us to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and links a search for names there with the maps of Vietnam that many people across America bought and puzzled over during the war.

Bruce Guernsey lives in Bethel and taught creative writing and American Literature for 25 years at Eastern Illinois University. His many books of poetry include “New England Primer” (Cherry Grove Collections, 2008) and “From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010,” (Ecco Qua Press, 2012).

The Wall

By Bruce Guernsey

Someone has opened a giant map

and with the tips of our fingers,

each of us suddenly blind,

we track the black cold of this monument

for names we know

like finding a route home.

Lost here

this damp spring morning,

the cherries exploding like the fourth of July,

we wonder how many maps of Viet Nam

sold those years,

so many strange sounding places.

One of us holds a magnifying glass

to McCarroll, McMorris, McNabb,

small print in the polished stone,

the way a neighbor, say, in Neoga, Illinois,

might have done, late at night

searching that faraway land on his kitchen table,

hearing again the morning paper

thump against the front door,

that boy on his bike in the dark

grown and gone—”what was his name,

that kid from down the block?”—

Khe Sanh, Da Nang, Hanoi.

Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is Portland’s poet laureate. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Poem copyright © 2017 Bruce Guernsey. It appears in “From Rain: Poems 1970-2010” (Ecco Qua Press, 2012) and appears here by permission of the author. For an archive of all the poems that have appeared in this column, go to www.pressherald.com/tag/deep-water.

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