Comfort for a Muse

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Comfort for a Muse
2005
© Shalin Hai-Jew

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Table of Contents
PART I: THIRST OF THE DRAGON
1. Thirst of the Dragon ------------------------ 5
2. Foreign Soil ------------------------ 7
3. School Mornings ------------------------ 9
4. Days Ago ------------------------ 10
5. Welcome Spring ------------------------ 12
6. Three Gypsies ------------------------ 14
7. Kinged ------------------------ 16
8. Grandma in Prayer ------------------------ 17
9. Mizuko ------------------------ 18
10. This Night ------------------------ 19
11. No Regrets ------------------------ 21
12. Gifts ------------------------ 27
13. Hong Kong with James, Jan. ‘84 ------------------------ 28
14. A Tourist Commune ------------------------ 29
15. Three Disasters ------------------------ 31
16. New Years Day ------------------------ 32
17. Chinese Girl ------------------------ 34
PART II: INTERPRETING THE SCENE
18. Interpreting the Scene ------------------------ 39
19. Aching ------------------------ 40
20. Hiroko ------------------------ 41
21. Man in Bed ------------------------ 42
22. Wuthering Heights ------------------------ 43
23. The Trail of Your Blood in the Snow ------------------------ 44
24. Private Dealer ------------------------- 45
25. Widow in White ------------------------ 46
26. Saving ------------------------ 47

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27. Losses ------------------------ 48
28. Food Chain ------------------------ 49
29. Drawing a Five-Petalled Flower ------------------------ 50
30. Meditation Over a Blue Baby in a Glass Crib ------------- 51
31. A Soldier’s Confession ------------------------ 53
32. The Farewell Party ------------------------ 57
33. Eurydice and the Lyre Player ------------------------ 58
PART III: THE LAKE
34. The Lake ------------------------ 59
35. Rachel ------------------------ 61
36. Far Fields ------------------------ 63
37. Inside ------------------------ 64
38. The Next Room ------------------------ 65
39. About Non-feeling ------------------------ 67
40. At the Jazz Alley ------------------------ 69
41. After Missy ------------------------ 70
42. Father’s Belt ------------------------ 71
43. Celibacy ------------------------ 72
44. Reciprocation ------------------------ 74
45. Only Two ------------------------ 75
46. John, Even the Dreams ------------------------ 77
47. Alliances ------------------------ 79
48. Turns ------------------------ 80
49. Brief Children ------------------------ 82
50. How to Read the Poem She Wrote for You ---------------- 85
51. Domesticity: Daphne and Apollo ------------------------ 87
52. Looking for the Catalyst ------------------------ 89
53. Comfort for a Muse ------------------------ 90
54. the seamstress ------------------------ 92
55. Parallels ------------------------ 94

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56. To be a Parent is that Bodily Prayer ------------------------ 95
57. Music and Light: A Wedding Toast for Emily ------------ 97
58. Kiss ------------------------ 99
59. Yours, Rick ------------------------ 102
60. The Face of my Assassin ------------------------ 103
PART IV: LAND OF MUTATIONAL ARTISTS
61. Land of Mutational Artists ------------------------ 105
62. Stroke Order ------------------------ 107
63. The Same Hand ------------------------ 109
64. Glass Walls ------------------------ 113
65. Artificial Day ------------------------ 115
66. Existence in Vague ------------------------ 118
67. First Bath ------------------------ 120
68. Strike! ------------------------ 122
69. Rumors: Disembodied Voices ------------------------ 125
70. Nu: Raising the Hem ------------------------ 129
71. Wandering the Maze Alone but not Really --------------- 134
72. Citizen of the World ------------------------ 136
73. Tasters in Her Castle ------------------------ 140
74. Ten Attributes of an Ideal Mate ------------------------ 148
75. Communion ------------------------ 146
76. Nothing to Say Afterwards ------------------------ 148
77. Virtuality ----------------------- 150
78. One’s Solitude ----------------------- 151

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PART I: THIRST OF THE DRAGON
THIRST OF THE DRAGON
For Gim Jueng, my maternal grandfather (1908 – 1988)
Sharp air folds like gift wrap
and queue-braids water on rocks.
Ribs pressed on the ship rail,
I listen to your tattered
voice crumple, listing
and snapping like sails;
you ask if I’d noticed
how the push and pull of waves
imitate hands kneading hombough
dough.
We balance on water-washed
decks and throw laughter
out like red New Year’s streamers.
You say all ships remind you
of the freighter that juggled
you from Hong Kong to Canada
to the States: waves sucking foam
at the bow, breath of steam, sting of salt.
Your black-gold jacket
fits tight on the shoulder
like a harness and rides to the waist,
but you say it’s a ship voyage
tradition. You tell me that
you’re a sojourner, but the hands
that once opened to welcome

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you back are held akimbo.
Foreign sounds, unborn
in your hollow pronunciations,
speak in your receding eyes
and I hold your 73-year
worn body to mine, trying
to anchor you to a way alien,
while I watch you sink
like an ocean-emptied
bottle, trying to collect a rich
wine vintage—long diluted.

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FOREIGN SOIL
Visiting Grandpa years ago, I
remember the tender tree he’d
planted as a boy in America, a seed
pocket-saved before the stormy
ship ride to the States. The tree
stretched so high, I thought it tugged
at clouds rumbling by, bursting
them like a pin to a balloon,
releasing floodgates of rain, needles
of sleet, so unlike the warm,
smooth Wunsind river water. Clawing
the trunk, heels feeling for a notch,
I reached for the first branch.
Six years later, climbing on lower
boughs in faded denim overalls, rubber-
banded pigtails, a fresh shoestring
of licorice clienched between a front
row of permanent teeth, I’d look
down and wonder if I dared to jump—
but looking up, the ground seemed
closer. Watching Grandpa stroke
the coarse bark, prune branches like
layering a French haircut and picking
hard, bitter fruit to ripen, days spent
on window sills basking in a cold
sun, I would stand hugging the trunk.
My fingers never met.
Hair feathered back in crooked steps,

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teeth harnessed in braces, I’d talk
politics, school and family gossip
whenever we visited St. Louis. Late nights
after six-course dinners, I would tiptoe
out to feel the dewy crisp of leaves,
weigh fruit in the palm of my hand,
bobbing the branches. I thought I saw
a shadowed face watch me from Grandpa’s
room while I tried to climb thick
branches with etiquette, riding
the heavy wood like a lady, legs
swung over to one side.
Sounds of graduation parties still
clear, I visit—this time, alone. I see
this heen jun thloot lei tree
stops long before the sky even begins.
The crusted trunk, drained and weighted
with fungi, marred by Midwest ice
winters, is hollowed and splintered
like salt driftwood. Grandpa says
he is too tired to mother the China
tree, too tired to raise himself up on his
elbows to look. Now I know this fisted tree
can no longer hold my weight.

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SCHOOL MORNINGS
A weather-baked girl runs
from the cement house.
Her gray shift flaps
around her ankles
as she lifts it, picks
her way through sod-ridden
fields to the irrigated ruts
of rice. She drops
her sagging book bag
on a placemat of leaves.
Pinwheeling her arms,
she digs her callused heels
into the rice heads,
burying them under
the infested waters to root
in bull manure. Her feet
rise and fall like pistons.
Numbed by leeches
draining her thin blood,
she peels at the double-headed
worms, pulling one suckered
head off her shin. Spitting,
she drags the other head off,
rinses the squirming body
to save for friends
to dry, decorating the ends
of young bamboo.
She watches the low hills
for a sign of the bus.

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DAYS AGO
Like a crumpled paper cutout,
a body is outlined
through sterilized hospital
sheets stretched over a cold
slab of bed. Fluorescent
overheads whitewash
the walls and pencil-detail
shadows on the woman’s half-
turned face. The spicy
aftertaste of Hong Kong
incense lingers. On the window
sill shelving, dentures float
in a plastic cup of yellow
fluid set atop the woman’s
large scrapbook, flapping
with feathery clippings, now
as fine as toilet paper.
A chess set waits in a one-step
checkmate, left by visitors
months ago. In the walk-in
closet, dresses cling sparsely
on the metal rail, the chiffons,
fitted to the measurements
of a wasted body, have since
been stolen, marked by empty
hangers. Held in the splinter
between dreams and waking,
her skin-stretched hand
maneuvers through the sprays

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of washed-out perm fanned
on the stark foam pillows.
She mumbles, sound of sleep
and hollow air from her puckered
mouth. Brown eyes overcast
with translucent splotches of
blue membrane focus on the 1979
calendar—nurse’s handwriting
reminding her of the daughter
who should have arrived
for a visit days ago.

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WELCOME SPRING
(for my maternal grandmother, Ng Hor Chun Jueng)
Hor Chun, your body is a taut-stringed
chang, light as April wind in Peking.
A web of tenacious silk, you bind me
to our land of spice, uncoil
this thread from your spinning wheel
as I drift from Mexican cornfields
to the Cascades, leeching this soil
for coal, beans and cucumbers. Nights
I spent in California mines, coal
caking in my lungs, my fevered dreams
echoed your butterfly step, until
breath eased back, soft as your voice
at dawn.
The Gam Lam hills hold our mark,
tattooed in the raw curve of valleys.
Hor Chun, across oceans, this weighted
sun drowns early in these mountains
of granite. Everything I have shaped
is folding in front of me; the mines
are filling with dirt, and sand
does not float from my nails. Seasons
have died, leaving my legs bowed
inward, knees stained with clay.
The ink strokes I pen on tissue,
hand-delivered to you by returning
miners, dry dark as the ebony

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of your leaf-shaped eyes. This brush
is slipping, so I will mouth these words,
fourteen years muted, “I love you,
Hor Chun,” decorated in sequins, silk
and scarves of incense smoke
like the dolls in Hong Kong windows.
Reel back these strings; weave a dress
of blood silk, a veiled headdress,
a ring. Find me on the next freighter
home.

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THREE GYPSIES
(for my mother)
Balancing on Oriental spike heels,
these three Zhou daughters squint
from the Kodak print, their silk
dresses shaping their bodies
with cloth hips and cardboard collars.
They lean forward, maybe to talk
or stay upright. Gold gypsy beads,
plastic roses and pearl brooches
draw down their flat bosoms, line
their necks and sun-stroked arms.
Serious in their dressed-up beauty,
they are unaware that the silk dyes
and embroidery do not mix with
the Kansas browns of the lawn,
or the wood A-frames of house
in construction behind them. Slippered,
Carolyn smiles through zippered brows,
her blue silk skirt puddled
around her ankles like cast-off clothes.
She cannot be taller than four feet.
Daiyan holds her coral skirt out
like bat wings, chest puffed out,
a belt hula-hooped around her American
jumper. Hands taped flat on her thighs
to show off the ten-cent rings
on each finger, Sonya stands with her toes
pointing inward. Her earrings do not
match: one springs outward, a locked
pendulum, while the other droops

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like the water of a sprinkler behind them.
There are patches of green, a calico
of browns, tans and leaf. In this
tapestry, a boy bikes past with a Federal
Way News bag on his shoulder.
He turns to watch this parade of gypsies.

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KINGED
Crumpled like an embroidered pillowcase
on the floor, the old woman cries
in the smoldering of incense and steamed glass.
She is packing to return to Ohio;
her daughter has told her, “Your two years here
are up. You should go back while the weather
is warm.” She has found money
as a thumb in sponge cake
leaves little impression. A kinged checker,
she is finally moving backwards
in a history of frontiers: Canton
to Hong Kong to Ohio to Seattle.
She is surprised at how the board
has cleared so quickly, how she can move
and not see another for several turns.
Soil, beyond red and black, flavors the meats,
the sun in her laundry. Only her dreams
recycle, black on gray, gray
going grayer. Her eyes swell
like beans in water, shift up
towards her skull at night.
She wonders how maternal love fails
so utterly that hate can spread like clover,
spread so that her daughter can carve
her out of her grandchildren’s lives,
so utterly weeded out. Astonished
at each thump of her heart, she thinks
a piece of her must erode and drift
into her blood for it to be creeping
so slowly now. So red. Black.

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GRANDMA IN PRAYER
Kneeling
by dark windows,
she waves incense, spicing
thick air with incantations, Far
East wands.

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MIZUKO
“water children”—babies conceived but not born
A geyser between
the legs, stabbing like ice, floes
clogged at the delta—
a child’s white face in the clouds
suddenly dissolves to rain.

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THIS NIGHT
For J.W.Y.
Taste of peaked champagne
dry like salt in my throat,
I twist in your hands
and watch the sting
of Japanese tissue roses
unfold, a fist of the Issei.
From the open shutters,
pine rustles like broom straw.
We lie still to listen.
In the newborn calm
after a Midwest rainstorm,
when wind-weary cones drop
back on hard soil,
we have fallen.
Air spills like rain over us;
the moment for dreams passes,
untallied. Words pelt heavy
and dissolve into this night
as sumi strokes to wet rice
paper sheaths. We huddle
like children waving warmth.
High tide stealing sand
from under our feet,
we pull closer. But the end
was written before we turned

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page one, lines scribed
on open palms. I recall
your laughter, your voice,
until the silence becomes a noise.
You roll away.

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NO REGRETS
1.
The midwife worked in a haze of sweat,
straw ash, blood, kerosene flicker
and the dank odor of earth
inside the concrete house. Christened
in water drawn from a pump and boiled,
Welcome Spring grabbed her mother’s breasts,
limp and dry like crab apples. She suckled
in gasp, strained her red body. Days old,
she was left with a village girl, rich
with milk, who fed and bathed her
for a fist of rice. The baby grew
among rags high in shelves where the pigs,
poultry and dogs running through
couldn’t reach her. Born into the peasantry
and female, she was ignored. Her mother died
that year during a mild Guangzhou winter.
2.
Rawhide rubbed over bone, Hor Chun worked
the soggy partitioned fields. She heeled rice heads
into manure; weighted the plow with other
ten year olds; danced on pedals turning
the water wheel to bend the infested river.
At dusk, she helped auntie feed the stove;
shape pestle-ground flour for pastries; thrash
bundles to scatter quail-colored grains;
feed the busy chickens, sour piglets.
She swam first during floods by paddling
on a wooden door; later, during wash days

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at the river. While auntie brought the animals
to the roof, water rising, Hor Chun would sit
on a stool waving a long bamboo
to keep eels out of the bedroom. She played
occasionally with the village children,
hooking double-headed leeches inside out
like sleeves to dry, or trailing gray sacks
of pastries, newly-won kites. Hor Chun’s hair
seldom hung past her shoulders as a peddler
came to buy her reddish strands with chopsticks
swirled in maltose, thick from fire. She thought
she recognized her hair in the brushes,
dolls and decorations the hair trader’s wife sold.
She recalled the choked sweet.
III. The nineteenth notch just carved crooked
on her stiff board bed, Hor Chun noticed added
movement at home, visitors uncommon as meat
for dinner. Home early from the one-room girl’s
school, she heard Auntie Chu brag about a man
Uncle met on a transatlantic freighter.
The Chu family would not need roving beggars
as matchmakers, Auntie said. He wore Pendleton
hats. He owned a laundry in Ohio. He
lived in Canton until 14, when the Juengs
moved to America; Gim Jueng wrote and spoke
both languages as if he straddled the ocean.
Gim (said aloud) meant “gold.” Months
of negotiations left Hor Chun engaged to a man
she’d only heard of through mud walls.
Married in a celebration of villagers, relatives,

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she squinted as her string headdress
was finally parted, eyes examining her flushed face,
hourglass in silk, cardboard collar, hooks.
She saw only indifference in his face—
which she would not recall to schoolmates—
not telling of the husband who left days after
for America, who mailed back pressed U.S. dollars,
no love letters. She questioned his fidelity,
having heard of the half-breed whores
who traded hours for cigarettes. Hor Chun
prayed with meats, incense, muttered offerings
to the spirits looking down. Three years later,
on his second visit to the province,
Hor Chun became pregnant, hoping the child
would be the ticket overseas, hoping to wash
clean of clay, stench of gutter.
IV. Aih. Eyes dry as her breasts, she stared
at the stove and refused to write until weeks
after she’d named their daughter Wong Dai,
“to bring a boy child.” She adopted a dying woman’s
son a year and a half later. Seasonal monsoons
sweeping the land like strings of wet pine,
she weaned her children from cow’s milk
to rice, thumbed clumps into their mouths
between planting. She piled ash-dusted stool
for the kohlrabi, eggplant, string beans, melon,
bok choy, while Wong Dai slept in shade,
Little Gim strapped on her back. She watched
the red sky, lines fanning her eyes, cheeks
like bowls. Japanese warplanes swooped

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to survey the villages they later scattered
with bombs. On air raids, she cradled her son
with blankets while Wong Dai went ahead with food,
familiar with the hills. For the first time
in daylight, Hor Chun said her husband’s name.
V. Glances thrown like cleavers, the women’s voices
lowered at the market eight miles away.
Hor Chun’s husband sent gold. Hor Chun bought
more fields, a second stone house, water buffalo.
Hor Chun’s children attended high school
on Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. Whispers.
Gerng chan ong. The Communist Party. Weeks later,
neighbors demanded proof of her patriotism.
They melted her metal doors into guns, gold
into bullets. They portioned her fields, houses;
wore her silk robes, slaughtered the animals.
Her knees and palms were forced on broken shells
so she would renounce her marriage
to a naturalized American, a defector, a capitalist.
She recognized the people as beggars she’d fed.
She warned her children not to write, never to return.
The storm spread like spilled ink.
She paid the several ounces of gold, hidden
in sausage, for passage to Hong Kong by cargo ship
at night. She waited days after it docked
before she left for her daughter’s address,
afraid the captain would ask further payment
and unsure he’d anchored in the right port.
In hiding, she watched silk-swathed women
nuzzling sailors along the waterfront,

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in street light. Her mind drifted to excursions
in the hills, explosions in the distance;
she woke mumbling like a fortuneteller.
VI. Gim brought a basket for his daughter,
said “Wong Dai” like calling for his adopted son.
Hor Chun told Wong Dai of the visit the day Gim
arrived in Kowloon, warning her: Don’t speak first.
A person who is born does not call for the parent.
The parent must call first. Wong Dai stood
sullen, her first meeting with her father at 16,
fingered the raisins, wrapped candy, biscuits, plum.
Gim stayed one more day to meet Little Gim
before he left with Hor Chun for America.
You’ll receive your letters, too, she told
her children in parting; you’ll be Americans.
In Toledo, Gim and Hor Chun moved into rooms
above the Laundromat, the bedroom warm
over the drying room, which they rented for $35
a month. Piece by piece, Hor Chun replaced
wood crates, cots, cardboard boxes, with chairs,
mattresses, dressers and cabinets. When competition
and permanent press left them with a few regulars,
Gim quit and worked as a cook
in a Chinese-American restaurant. He trained nights
as a meat cutter. Offered a black man’s job,
he refused, telling Hor Chun: I would not pour
another man’s rice into my own bowl.
When Gim chose not to play mah jongg and drink
with the other cooks after the late shift,
he and Hor Chun walked arm-in-arm to watch

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cheap movies. Once they bought the black and white TV,
they seldom went out, except to the post office.
Hor Chun wrote her children every month, sending
photos of herself in floral print dresses,
Gim in checkered suits and hat. She told them
to study English, described the life they would have
once S-e-n-a-t-o-r A-s-h-l-e-y’-s bill was passed
under E-i-s-e-n-h-o-w-e-r. She spelled the names
reverently from the newspapers but wrote the rest
in Chinese.
VII. Watching for Wong Dai with her biology texts,
wing-tip glasses, Hor Chun spit profusely
as Catholic nuns from Mary Manse College
crossed the street. Little Gim had married
a Hong Kong woman, moved to Toronto, Canada. #####

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GIFTS
Overlapping bites, we shared an apple
on the ride to Sea-Tac Airport. I talked
of homesickness. Jennifer, my youngest,
talked of going abroad: “I was born
in Montgomery, but I’m still Chinese.”
We drank coffee and watched children ride
the escalators. Over the loudspeakers,
a voice announced flights, wandering toddlers,
abandoned cars in the no-parking zone.
Jennifer bought plastic earrings, “to go
with your purple robe, Ma.”
When I gave her the stationery, she asked,
“Do I get stamps, too?” At the boarding
gate, I waited for the lobby to empty
before I held her, “Hurry, Jen.” But
she dropped her shoulder bags to unbutton
my sweater. “Don’t be such a prude,”
she said into my hair. “I’m your kid.”
Going home, I drove the old truck
sixty miles an hour up the I-5 ramp.

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HONG KONG WITH JAMES, JAN. ‘84
Smoke bulged from the melt of lights
below as if the stone high-rises, docks,
and factories, burned. Starting at the peak
on this mound of graves
our last night in Hong Kong,
we stepped around the concrete vases
crowding the hill like hovels
and resolute: These are our dead.
In the drizzle, we worked our way down,
quickening as cars and buses swerved
around us on narrow overpasses,
illuminating the names. Joking, we lit
the incense to see better
in that dusk fast becoming night.
Finally we sat and opened the shopping bags,
left flowers and passed the wine.
“Cheers, grandpa,” James shouted,
while the vases filled.

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A TOURIST COMMUNE
The Chinese guide performed a folk song,
his hand on the driver’s headrest.
Dirt through the windows circled
our swollen ankles. Several of us
sucked preserved plumb, mints,
as we bussed to the commune
in the brochure. Three bicyclists
edged the elevated two-lane road.
Less practiced, they would have spilled
into irrigated fields with the farmers
and water buffalo. Leaves hung
from the parallel groves of trees
like laundry; the sun pressed noon.
Hens the color and odor of clay
pranced the roofs, ditches, a pyramid
of water pipes. A retired woman
answered questions about her 74 years
spent raising a son and daughter
in the commune. Except for a few
who went to see the hospital,
the busload crowded her living room
to listen. Under the display glass
on her coffee table were color photos
of relatives, some left by visitors.
Maybe the travel agency or government
left them, someone said.
We shit in latrines, waved flies
with Kleenex from our bags.

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We lunched on chicken, the flesh tight
as marrow in bone. Small peeled oranges,
punch-sweet, were dessert.
Boys crept out as we lined up to board
the bus back to Guangzhou.
One six-year-old (a woman later guessed)
stepped up saying pen-pen.
I dug out a pencil, a Papermate—
several cameras clicked—he grabbed both
and returned to a shady doorway
with the others. The bus drove us back
to the White Swan Hotel for dinner.

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THREE DISASTERS
“Asians believe that everyone must guard against three disasters in life: fire, thieves, and
ghosts.” --Chinese astrology
You pause the pause before confessions
while I trace the yoke of your collarbone,
lift your robe off all the way down
so it catches on your wrists.
The dikes behind your eyes,
are they to contain or deflect?
The mood elusive as first light,
you close me out beyond the beige veil
of your eyelids. I touch you like stroking
raised hairs. If I tip your chin,
your eyes will keep you. Through our maze
we stumble to this place again. You will wake
from your trance, certain the wish rings
will be lodged on your fingers.
Do you know how many nights
you could have stayed? Do you imagine
I will surround you like fire, pocket
your seed like coins, enter
your sanctuary with the wind?

32
NEW YEAR’S DAY
The ceremonial pits of glowing rocks simmer.
The farmers leave their tools and buffalo
for a rare morning of diversion. The curing salts
are rolled out in barrels. The men watch
the two strangers from a neighboring village
sharpen their cleavers.
The hairy communal pig lies in its yard
while children point and flock like flies.
A grandfather rests inside his dank stone house.
His wife scrubs the pots for that delicacy—
brain—stewed with herbs and wine for hours.
A man brings his pans to make glue
with the feet. A woman measures the hand-ground
flour for pastries. The bristles will go
to brushes, to last the new year.
These villagers are resourceful as spiders
who make webs from the food they consume.
The pig’s hands are tied partway behind
its back, before it grunts and kicks.
Children have settled into a broken circle
to watch. The cleaver sinks into the throat
with a grunt. The pig cries and shits.
His eyes are white, big as plates.
He’s bloodier now than at birth.
A girl runs to put her head against her mother’s
legs, but is brushed away as her mother hurries
for her share. The pig has translated into use.

33
The next day, year of the pig, a girl sits
on her doorstep—groggily eating from the bowl
her mother pushed into her hands. She chews
the pork slowly, but spits out mouthfuls
of rice, gristle. She’s weary from a night of dreams.
Chickens cluck and peck at the grains.

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CHINESE GIRL
(for my mother)
I.
A peasant in a wide-brimmed straw hat
squints at our van hurtling by on dust
like a time machine. The paddles change
around her figure—upside-down L, hengzhe.
The ground fluffs in wind; melts in water,
clumps into dung, bone, weed, roots, seed.
Rice heads rise into green hair, on lips
of red earth, age golden. Her sole purpose
is to connect soil and sky, that crucial
human screw. I, foreign guei in my ancestral
land, look to this unadorned girl
through streaked glass as if she bore
the whole of history in the creases
of her hands. A laugh wells up my gullet:
it signifies one of twenty faces,
none of them mirth.
II.
My first two decades of life can be traced
to my parents, the urges of their flesh,
code of blood running like alcohol
through this living machine, the rev.
My choices have been between the lamb
or the fish, spoon or fork.
Here, where it seldom snows, I learn
the lesson of the snowflake—that
a thing could be both unique and generic.
How can I describe the effect

35
of a billion people, heads of black hair
with the rare albino blond; the translucent
petal skirts of girls; the men
chain-smoking and swatting at flies;
the children sucking salted plums,
squatting and hair dogs licking up?
Can I tell you that not once was I correct
when I recognized a friend from behind?
Or that I mistook an urchin’s cry
for my son’s? I bicycled through innumerable
backwater alleys past darkened doorways
of concrete caverns
without destination, without conscious memory
and failed to be lost.
Boys played pool in unlit rooms. Garish
video games, imported from Xianggang
explode and wither electronically.
Women scrub clothes on jagged wooden boards.
Peasants shoulder basket poles
of eggs, vegetables, pots, brooms,
toward market, sway rhythmically by.
Buckets of charcoal are stoked
for cooking. Baozi steamed in wicker trays
are sold on street corners. Twists of dough
sizzle in woks of boiling oil, airy crisps
sold and eaten standing. Unnoticed, I
watch children dash through husks
of buildings under construction
red bricks, bamboo scaffolding,
and imagine I could be subsumed
into this, but instinct leads me back downtown.

36
Neither butterflies nor caterpillars
acknowledge the cocoon. What happens
to the rare creature who doesn’t sleep
during metamorphosis when change is slow
and silken strands are too thin?
What’s mortality when there are thousands
to survive breathing the ashes
of crematoriums. A newborn is pushed
into a night bucket to suffocate
in her parents’ vegetable shit
and disappointment. Another is raised
in a crate like a city chicken.
Forget the accidental happenings:
a child grows up or stops—
it’s that simple. Taste buds
know excitement regardless of the flavors.
We live the lives handed us
unaware of the extinct fruits which fed
those who came before.
A girl falls in love or doesn’t.
All is as it should be; the dying are rich
with the balm of death; children
find toys around trees, in rubbish,
students have dog-eared texts,
politicians have speeches;
pigs have mud and orange peels;
tourists carry home their exposed film, bellies;
monks outfit themselves for visitors
with foreign money for donation pails
in painted temples with Kodak film stands.
The living and dying contend

37
for nothing: hit-and-run drivers leave
their sputtering victims by the roadside
at night, for fear of a few years or months
in prison. The sorcery is number:
If I had one of something, I’d trade it
only for redemption. If I had a hundred,
I’d become a merchant. What’s a life
stacked against infinity, who continually
evaporate like the garbage in stone bins
which burn daily? The longest recorded
civilization on earth—China—has forgotten
how to be civilized, as if collective
amnesia had set in of pleasantries
for strangers. Few gaze beyond their circle
of dialect, customs and pride.
Urine, sputum, shit are emptied
from human vessels for the public
responsibility. Any gesture is a move
of the mass. Naïveté allows us
to go forward with some bravado.
Wisdom cautions too firmly for us
to watch and wait for the stars’
guidance. It is enough to admire
a caked leaf.
III.
The marketplace reeks
of slaughtered livestock dripping on hooks,
muddy vegetables on wagons, sweat.
It’s wall-to-wall humanity—the deformities,
not the abstractions. A man stands

38
upright on his hands, his legs twisted
behind his heads like antlers
for some prenatal sin.
He shouts and bounces to have our attention
in a dialect pronounceable to all—pain.
That mysterious decision—private
Guilt, prayers—we toss our money
into the bucket—how much easier
it is to pay for luscious flesh,
than this. The button man dozes
oblivious to the daily dramas
in his colorful stall of mirrors,
strings, bags, needles, yarn. I buy
a handful of buttons
for less than a penny
and wonder if there’s a common money
to count the split cents
the difference
between us.
(Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, People’s Republic of China, 1988 – 1989)
INTERPRETING THE SCENE—PART II

39
INTERPRETING THE SCENE
(from an Untitled photo by Jane Tuckerman, 1979)
A naked woman leans out the open window,
arms raised in reverence to the light
that hugs her like the damp room, her face, torso,
lost as a body immersed in water.
From where we stand, probably in a doorway,
we see floorboards dank around her feet
where moisture weighted the wood before her.
Darkness a halo in the corners, under
The heater, on the fourth wall beyond sight,
the light, too, is unrevealing. On tiptoe,
does she see what lies below: eight floors
down? a spread of lawn and tulips?
brick? If she turned around, silhouetted,
she could laugh at our stealth, our concern,
trip back into the room seemingly darker,
and empty of chairs and voices. Or not.
We would like to imagine it so. Okay,
there is this woman, and her motive.
A pose. A dare. A joke. Our latter explanations
are ludicrous as this naked woman
halfway over the sill. But then,
there is this light. Like warmth?

40
ACHING
(from a bronze sculpture of the same title by William Crozier, 1980 – 81)
This bronze woman lies malleable to you
this night. Her intent is irretrievably stated,
rippled out from its glorious
slab of silence. You stand erect, back turned
in momentary reprieve: if you faced her
would there even be choice? You shout up to sky
for some savior at this late time.
Your hands ache to mold her furrowed body
yet fall outwards, empty as birds
with twisted beaks: as if touching were indelible;
as if this weren’t just another waltz
explaining away the unfamiliar
like a wash of acid; as if she moved
in a hundred stances of desire.
In this potluck of misers, what you bring
is what you take away. You rise on your toes,
for what? That moment of imminent release,
satiated or not? You balance on her numb feet.
You won’t let her up; you won’t take her.
What’s keeping you? she asks.
You say: soon.

41
HIROKO
You cannot be older than eleven,
your smock lifting like a bell
over leather pants. I am drawn
not the machine gun poisoned
on your slim shoulder, nor to the line
of blood on your cheek, but
to your cropped hair, the bubble
of your mouth. This pose, finger
on the heavy trigger, holds no threat
compared to the blank indefinition
in your amber eyes, the sureness
of choice, of sacrifice.
MAN IN BED

42
(from a painting of the same title by Georg Baselitz, 1982)
He hides the shiver in his groin
with his legs curled up.
His eyes dream through this chalky
field edging in. A vortex
draws in his menthol breath, grows
with each hour, fans him. All he named,
lost: a lover in his blood,
a teething child, house, the soil
in his nails, collage of rain, irises.
He is a husk on this curtain at dawn.
Yet he waits for someone
to lie beside him.

43
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
(for RT)
Finally your bleak heart has led you back
to where our feet were entwined in the gravel
of childhood, where our branded palms met.
We could have lived grandly,
thundered in these black reeds;
turned fully from the light that marked us
to follow our shadows into the dark.
I called through clotted lips
on nights when the translucent eyes of men
might carry shimmers of you.
Why three years of exile
if this was only play: could your cruelty
match mine, your love meet this?
I applaud us—contortionists in our one-ring act.
Nothing changes—revelation like the first hole
through rock. How could you leave
if you loved me? How could you return?
When we close our eyes, it’s the same
voices and drums and wings we hear.
Ants move across my vision.
Endings aren’t so simple. I’ll return
to inhabit your soul.

44
THE TRAIL OF YOUR BLOOD IN THE SNOW
(from a drawing of the same title by Mel Odom, 1984)
In this lunar dream, I track
with white eyes
the forest of your leavings:
metallic hair ribbon,
blades of roses,
red string,
the kiss—sunk in the sweet
stinking tongues of winter orchids,
the tinkling of water
inside an icicle.

45
PRIVATE DEALER
“Illusion is the first of all pleasures.” --Francois de Voltaire
Her mini-dress the gray of camouflage
the blonde sleeps on the couch
like a defense tactic of appearing
skeletal, aloof as a fish floating
through coral to wait out the predator.
Oblivious to the people passing in and out
of doorways like smoke, she dreams herself
into another bed, reincarnated
into the sunny season after hibernation.
She revels in silence like healing,
coasting between drugged and tired sleep.
Needle tracks strewn as the scraps
of her habit—syringes and vials—
she cannot shape the life expanding
beyond her, save her body, its single-minded
thirst. When she surfaces, she will
have succeeded in channeling
all she left for her solo sleep to new
purpose; it will be enough to continue.

46
WIDOW IN WHITE
(from a tempura on paper by Marcos Gaitan titled It’s Been This Way for Years, 1910 –
85)
Insects buzz inside this white church.
On this webbed coffin, a woman rests
from the heat. Her fingers trace the wood
as if describing the contents
of a hope chest.
Outside are acres of men.
Dogs chase a rooster through an alley.
She listens for the elegy in chimes
from the bell tower, where the sky ends.
Like flowers, she mourns.
She has brought pieces of the missing—
tobacco, pouch, Bible, too, razor—
medals for the abandoned. Children
bounce balls against the stucco, stone.
Seeds drip from bouquets into the dust.
Among the crosses, she imagines voices
of the men who have left her,
rising in a cloud of butterflies, moths,
like draft through these cracked clay floors.
Her breath warms the cedar.

47
SAVING
Packed in their mother’s fluid,
the fetuses resemble bruised pinkies
with snouts, limbs, tails. Because
the jar is unmarked as their bellies,
we cannot know from which dying
mammal these bodies were retrieved
and preserved. Whatever form
they were born to, they are bloated
now, shimmying with my curious shaking
as of a glass ball with a snow scene
of membrane. The topmost fetus
dives quietly, motionlessly
into the float of bodies, headlong,
balanced against the lid
as if there were no room for it,
like some amphibious animal.

48
LOSSES
Alongside the trapped
fly, the web suspends the husk
of a dead spider.

49
FOOD CHAIN
Daddy, your words force-fed
like tomatoes from your father
to you, have become my flesh,
flesh that will one day shudder
and roll forth another body
to fill with words
until my body has drained,
and the burden lies on my child
to find another toothless
mouth to spoonfeed
that will not be mine.

50
DRAWING A FIVE-PETALLED FLOWER
(for my family)
Start with a splotchy felt-tip pen,
an incidental dot floating
on a scratch pad. Each petal
must overlap, yet
hold its own shape, a swivel
at the tip like whipped cream.
Trail a stem to anchor this kite
where two leaves sprout,
balancing like propellers.
Assume the roots
as you assume the infinite
seeds stacked
where you first began.

51
MEDITATION OVER A BLUE BABY IN A GLASS CRIB
What discomfort makes you rage,
curled like a fist, tired so early,
irrevocably? No human need.
Will your single lover visit soon
like a tongue feeding you in whole,
gnash of gums? Will he be a gaseous
dream in which you breathe water, surface
drowned? He may enter as a blood transfusion
or the stone you birth firsthand,
a rock you have carried all along.
The syllabus of your name leak
into our voices like hysteria,
“Christopher.” What comfort, not going on
like cancer, not hearing commandments
and breaking them like saplings close
to the root. He will come coaxing
before you have created hunches
of his arrival, before your strange faith
is whittled away like gripped toys.
He will rain in, relentless and constant
as absence. Beyond the sad
incidental message of your passing,
it may be hard to hear his lullaby.
One hour, you will realize it is a stranger
lying where you slept, unfamiliar
as you are with this casing of flesh,
rise from it like brushing through curtains

52
to another stage, to different light.

53
A SOLDIER’S CONFESSION
I have been deemed unfit
by the most-suitable of my peers.
Alone in this room, I will help analyze
my crimes against the state
in my thoughts and actions. I will hereby
sign my name to this confession.
Oh, I have failed to be vigilant,
my esteemed peers, representatives of our
beloved country. I have listened to lies
and become delinquent to my duties.
My ancestors are restless in their graves.
My mother has disowned me, chewing
the umbilical cord with her own teeth.
In these four years in my cell,
I have thought only of five minutes’ lapse,
and waited for this moment when I can finally
take part in my denouncement.
You have all the evidence before you. My face
has been captured for eternity on your videos.
My letters demonstrate how far my thoughts
have wandered off official righteousness.
Indeed, there can be no denial of my actions.
I make no claim to correctness: I plead
Guilty. I go too far; I respond
by instinct, not forethought. Let me erase
my footprints, so no one can follow.
You place me at the center of this tribunal
to ask if I may be reformed.
I humbly beg your patience. I am unfit
to be in your presence. My hands

54
have been corrupted by gunpowder.
I was misled by foreign powers
who wanted to undermine our superior system,
our hard-working citizens, pure women.
I grovel before you, my superiors.
The illusion was so seductive, my compatriots,
that we could stand without bending,
shouting our beliefs to the sky, open air.
Let me reveal my delusions, so manipulated
was I. When the leader of our army said
shoot the enemies I responded
as if a trigger had been released
in me. Why couldn’t I recognize my fellow citizens
there in the center of our capital,
our borders sealed to intruders—the locals
pulling my sleeves and begging self-control?
My patriot blood ran thin, comrades.
When the boy stood there by the road rail,
He was staring with such un-childlike dispassion,
Nothing like I was feeling as a man.
I was a rabid dog. Yet, he questioned
in his clear eyes—an endless ageless
query. See how my hands tremble now,
and I am only 25. There are brown spots
creeping across my palm, blackening my fate.
I am afraid to touch my face.
I am a marked man, comrades. These hands
show you what my eyes have seen.
Do not reinstate me into the Army.
Do not ask me to recant.
Do not ask if I bear greetings to my family,

55
my village, my province, my people.
Do not offer my uniform back, pressed,
with gleaming medals, a new rank.
Do not hand me a new gun, and place another
trigger in my heart.
I have seen enough for one lifetime.
I beg only for time to scrub these spots
before I return to dust.
Let me give back the years I took,
the endless potential of the boy
with soft ears, a bowl haircut, large eyes,
the parents behind that face, the name
smeared into oblivion. Do you know,
sitting here at this hard table, do you know
what a man is capable of with soft hands?
Have you any idea what a word can mean
especially a command to a soldier?
Can you see the boy’s spirit filling me,
filling my chest, now? The skirmish,
my friends, occurred behind that roadblock;
the war rages in unrelenting memory.
Spare me the details. Do you know
one flag flies as a shroud in my head?
I can bear no more knowing.
Let me turn my visions to that night, soften
the orange light shining above the square like flames.
Let me unload the angular bullets
into the latrine, freeing my chest
of its weight. Let me again pause
by the rail, this time, to caress the boy’s head
and shout for him to return home to mother’s warmth.

56
This time, let me rest my rifle
against the sweet earth, with not a bullet
exploded. Let me shove the boy into a time
unmarred by my existence, untwisted by power
struggles on high. Judges, I beg you to shackle
these useless hands. Leave me in solitude
so I may undo the moment.

57
THE FAREWELL PARTY
(from a mixed media piece titled Witness by Harold Tovish, 1985)
We demonstrate our immaculate skill
in this cool room, numbering and bagging the dead
down the long conveyer belt to the furnace,
the quota sheets proof of our productivity.
We pay our respects and are absolved.
We’re reconciled to this human toll, which
obscurely allows for the survivors—suspicious
of passion, patriotism, ideas, God.
Music plays 24 hours daily. We’re fat with years,
thrifty with organs, jewelry. Our fingernails
are clipped, faces masked for sterility.
So many same-size bags. The young come for us
in doorways. “Soldiers are trained to kill
and be killed,” we say. Ranks are easily filled;
they’re moving up. #1692 came down river,
#1693 collapsed in a trench, #1694 fell
from the sky. A bedtime fable: Somewhere
from the numerous fronts, a soldier returns home,
asks for bed and dinner.

58
EURYDICE AND THE LYRE PLAYER
Orpheus, devious lover, you bargain passage
with ghosts, men and gods to these clay caves
to win back the errant wife who found her mortality
with a shepherd. Limping, I sleep-walk
behind you in your footprints, pointing up
to earth. I stumble into your back, wet
with my breath. On the edge of illumination,
you stop. I watch you turn casually like the moon
reflecting hell back to me. I would forgive
your turning if it were my eyes you looked to,
not my mouth, my trust like the two-pointed pin
that holds my robe closed. Was it too much
to realize you had lost my twin, your creation?
Would it have spoiled your pilgrimage
to surface with a prize, instead of a lyre?
The moment of gratitude unreplicated,
mingling of light, the face of a woman
caught in the hug of your lies—what
was it in my face? You allow me
no other hangman, no other escort
from this earth, than yourself. Set
on completion, you possess to release
at will. The Fates, fooled, gift you
with their apathy; their decree stands
through all your strivings, your ploughing
into the eventual calm of these clay beds.
Orpheus, I will dream you next to me,
dream you whistling and holding me like a lyre.

59
THE LAKE: PART III
THE LAKE
“It’s a bitter thing we’ve leaving our children.” --Karl Menninger
All along, the warnings rang out around us.
Don’t go. Skirt the lake. Look away.
We saw the rotting wood, vacant shells, the weeds,
as if we could be convinced. We circled
the water; it contained us the way it contained
the sky, lights. Our eyes began reflecting
the lake. We sat in cars with lovers,
moved closer, and went all the way under,
stunned at the cold and so little air. We
had seen the returning limp past like soldiers,
bedraggled and too tired to speak. The swimmers
who lingered season after season, lost
in the mire, rose occasionally for appearances,
nodding and waving like beauty queens
except their skin hung like weeds over wood,
smelling like wet sand and as heavy.
Like a reptilian eye looking upwards
at the same sky the same distance away
from our own eyes, the lake made reflections
somehow closer and more beautiful than we saw
even our own faces in the hump and spin.
We tested the water with our toes,
stepped and struggled and sunk with the rest,
convince we were somehow blessed, luckier.
We fell or dove for the promise of depth,
of a greener sky, for our reflections staring
ashore long after we’d left. We traded

60
our bodies away, our clear eyes reflecting sky
clearer than the lake. When we hit
bottom, we realized the lake contained
only us, and that the sky was further away,
the lights further away. We rose to see
our footprints washed flat. Sand over sand,
we left no prints even as we crawled
out with the returning, children
walking barefoot over the shells we brought up,
leaving an occasional toe mark, heel print,
blood. Though we had seen the bottom,
become familiar with the cutting rocks,
we started to speculate again; the lake’s contents
had changed, shifted, improved.
Our daughter has gone to reflect
her child’s face on the surface, laughs
at my cautions. Oh, Mother, look at you!
I stand with the water drying around my neck,
my abdomen heavy as sand.
I know how I look.

61
RACHEL
When Rachel walks away from Brooklyn,
your photo studio on Fourth, Alex,
do not resist but spin away
like the feathered Las Vegas dancers
in exit. Accept her leaving
as you accept the weather, bills,
the way time molds friends into strangers,
Sauvignon Blanc grapes into wines,
with no tears or bitter nod. Find
the lazy afternoon harmony of air,
dot-to-dot of New York neon, hammock
of Buzzard’s Bay.
Young lovers, you clung too close
to feel the shadows, but on gray Long Beach
mornings, the silence rubs cool and dry
like ash. You cannot shield her
from human hungers or erect weather vanes
to predict these fickle winds. It is enough
that she has draped clover leis
around you, woven scarves and dark curtains
to keep out early light. Rachel has made
days and nights on her own time, the way
a child plays with the light switch.
Other men will wear her body
the way you have, then toss her away
like di, so sketch her
into the violence of your charcoal,
bare-armed trees. Watercolor your tears

62
into the landscape. Alex, shake out
your sheets; sweep your floors. Mold African
clay soft and harsh as her skin, then draw
together your drapes, so you will not know
when she turns out the lights.

63
FAR FIELDS
I know what gives inside you
and what breaks. Loud as rumors
this child is not yours to keep
though she’s possessed your body
nine months, your mind. Raise her
high over your head, to light.
Which of your weekend men will follow
a stroller? Rattling lovers’ baubles,
can you coax a gurgle? Will you
mistake her groans, sighs, bring
your breasts to her mouth like mine?
For what pleasure? Who
Will appreciate your girl shape?
Release her. The child is enough
like you: men stop to gape at her
on the street, to tear a piece
of ribbon from her dress. She, too,
will listen to their coos,
bedtime stories.
You still believe you can see
the far fields on a clear night
ascending the back stairs with a man.
Give her away like charity;
Increase the chances our child
May be different.

64
INSIDE
Sharon’s hair is a shade of black
he has never seen, coming home early
and watching her from the unlit stairwell.
She is still sleek as a 19-year-old
after their two children,
is sleek in the tabbis gowns
she designs for the glitterati.
She waits for some rose-toting lover
to serenade her, he thinks,
as she sits in the sill
finger-combing her dark hair.
Street lights silhouetting her
against the bedroom drapes,
she seems unaware of anything beyond
this circle of fluorescence, her city moon.
Head bowed, she sings to herself.
He likes to see her this way:
a naïve, simple girl,
though he knows she’s seen the back
of forty. He stands in the hushed street.
Hatted, scarved against the January chill,
he knows the rooms are warm,
his dinner freshly made, the children
fitted in beds. Inside, she
will be flighty and attentive.
Inside, Sharon will be wife.

65
THE NEXT ROOM
A woman hears her daughter whimper
in the next room from the crib.
Eyes heavy with Chuck’s quiche and champagne,
she thinks he is what sustains
her out of the suburbs, like her Valium
and orange juice. She forgets
what she hoped for in a live-in lover,
knows she needs Chuck with her
as if to balance a see-saw. Smoothly
as his hand tickles her thigh, she sleeps.
Mo-om. Confused, she wakes, thinks
how strange she still dreams of hurtling
down a black hole at 34,
how strange the images drip away
from her to different mornings, rooms,
men. Funny, too, how she sees her lovers
in Chuck, the way he drinks whiskey
with a lifted pinkie, teases her
about her wide hips. Eyes closed, she rolls
to her left. Any moment, she knows his
weight will draw her down against him.
Surprised Chuck is not beside her,
she opens her eyes for a moment,
feels her heart clench, release her back to sleep.
Chuck shakes her bare shoulder, says, “Your kid
ain’t breathing right.” The woman is awake
as if she had a Vivarin with her usual coffee.
Curled like larvae, Kimberley sleeps,

66
fingernails bluer than the bruises
the woman has found on her forehead
since he moved in in September, bluer
than the birds on the mobile above the crib.
The pain pulsing in her stomach reminds her
of the bone jutting from Kimberley’s arm,
a fist Chuck slammed into her own ribs
once when they wrestled. Chuck says nothing;
the woman will say that Chuck was in bed
with her, and that she heard a small whimper.
And that she was asleep and didn’t get up.

67
ABOUT NON-FEELING
“I’m interested in sex, I’m pre-occupied with sex, I love it. But most sex is about non-
feeling.” --Jack Nicholson
She opens to sleep like an incoherent lover,
grabbing, shifty and watching
for what skims over her body at night, harsh
as shared breath, for what passes
like the men who resurface in cafes,
grocers’, parking lots. Nothing
as specific as Paul saying, “The birthmark
on your hip looks like cursive
writing,” or Andrew, “I’m not pestered
by conscience.” She ponders
over the strangers at bus stops, alleys
who touch her skin and do not say,
as if touching were enough, cryptic
as the crosshatch lines etched
on her arms from sleep. What was lost
that was enacted, exchanged?
A late arrival who sees a door closing,
a curtain swinging back like a shirttail,
she wakes to a thrown pillow,
a numb leg, ivy-coarse hairs, sweat
or saliva or semen on her sheets
like forensic evidence of some occurrence,
remnants of a crowd from some miracle,
accident, find. She knows its
passing like a blur in the frame
of her left eye. New quiet,
a rinsed bowl, she is certain
of this night waltz, for, the fourth

68
night in a row, she has slept
her clothes off.

69
AT THE JAZZ ALLEY
Hours pile end on end.
We talk in this lonely window
facing the Avenue.
Haze of blue smoke,
our talk is crying, worn
and husky as the singer’s hum.
You thought endings
were all trophies, ribbons,
but after our long sprint,
we are winded, and rest,
legs cramped under the table.
Cadence of wine in your temples
your eyes are hard and misty
as the ice swirling in my glass.
The tables fill and empty;
voices fade like bass notes.
I smell your sweat, sharp
as cologne, sharp as this class
if it were to break in
my cool, wet palms.
You shove your wire-rim glasses
higher on your nose, rise clumsily,
teeth marks incised in your fork.
We leave together,
hands held loose as yarn.
Our eyes water;
the streets are so bright.

70
AFTER MISSY
1. Ben, a year, and still, you mutter God
your mind rent
like a running stitch, knotted.
Simple as coffee break gossip, an extra
wheelchair at lunchtime, a new tenant
in your convalescent home, you know
the color behind the obituaries.
You say the waning
must have begun long before these old people
groped into that quiet room
of the house, surely as there is no redemption
after the fourth vodka.
2. Aired, the bedroom is set just so
you will not stumble, so you can wander
through gardens or mines or sky
with no knobs, chairs to cushion
like potholes in your dreams.
You lumber into walls, head thudding
the carpet like a fist, grief
for her tailspin over the cut,
face in your sleeve, in a sleeve of holes.

71
FATHER’S BELT
Closing first the front door and then the patio,
side, garage and back doors, her father
has brought her back to the green and orange
family house; this time, from the Metro
busstop which he circled in the Pinto,
until she, anemic and dizzy, wise
at sixteen, returned with her untidy suitcase.
Rolling against the wall, Eva pushes
him away from her as if to make room
for the roar seeping up. Then, she stops.
She shuts down as if a tranquilizer
entered her blood, closing down
like a factory at five; she leans
forward to listen to him avidly, now.
The belt flips, loosens, clatters
to the carpet. Looking at her father’s belt,
she recalls how it striped her face
like birthmarks, or how it moved like a snake
from the loops of his pants to settle
on his discarded shirt, and his pants,
half-remembering his shape—warm
and deflating, on top.
Afterwards, thoughts like worms eating their way
out, she smoothes the cracks on the leather,
presses the buckle to her hot throat.

72
CELIBACY
I. Lying Fallow
This is the dry season, under an implacable
sky. Waiting is a tautness
like a drum skin stretched shiverless.
The past must be cut down like so much grass,
the ground turned over for a new season.
Learning to love after a disaster
is like learning to live after war,
where you choose the bland flavors
without salt—for taste, for wounds.
The horizon is a crooked line, etched
by a child, in every direction I turn.
Instinct, which goes unanswered,
discouraged, settles like a beast in silence.
The only blue is in wet memory.
II. A Light
A man says he wants to buy me anything
I want from the bar. There’s something
inexpressible in him that cannot be said
without us disrobing. The answer’s no.
My refusal isn’t personal
the way my acquiescence—in a more prolific
time—wasn’t personal. Either
would be a deception, one sweeter.
Check out the postures: missionary
sadist voyeur player possessed/possessors.
Eroticism is a state of soul.
For levity: Okay, just a cigarette.
The game begins, with a light.

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III. Les Femmes Tricottent
The knitters do by hand
what can be replicated by machine
in order to prove their womanhood
with productivity. The bedrooms are alight
with the clicking of wooden needles
in a mockery of industriousness.
The balls of thread are tight-wound,
tangles simply cut out, or worked
into the pattern. The women’s mouths
work on seeds, sucking, spitting,
and they talk of men.
A tug of yarn unwinds the raucous colors
of their femininity. When a garment
is finished, the knitters sell
to the highest bidder, or pull it apart,
roll it, and begin again.
IV. The Pinch
A pregnant woman feels the contentment
of the celibate, as she curls around
a force. She will discover love of the child
before the man. The livid stretch marks
expand, as he, the man, falls to earth.
To heal is to lie in sleep, while the body
Works a spell to bring together.
Mother, she shapes the life that shapes her.
Recovery demands a move:
Which way? Who to? What now?

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RECIPROCATION
Hair unmade as the bed
she bends into
for her first entering
at 14, she pulls
his shoulders to her teeth
as if pulling his torso
down would elevate
his lower body away from hers.
Afterwards, she sinks her chin
into his collarbone
and cries into him like a spade.

75
ONLY TWO
Hand cupped under a doughy chin,
the aproned woman drums
her fingers and listens to the strain
or a radio left playing
on the cutting board. Only two,
Melissa is crying
through the cracker-thin walls,
her birthday flute
already forgotten on the tile.
Chris pads in and pokes
at the streamers, whistlers
and confetti for the cake tin.
His Camp Nanaimo t-shirt shrunken
above his pushed-out navel,
dried candy staining his cheek,
he pouts. And then, he is gone.
Barefooting a warm trail back
into the dusky hall, an alley cat,
he shuffles. The woman watches
the rain bounce off the sill,
uncaught jacks on parched asphalt.
She thinks of how Melissa tried
to blow through her teethy gaps,
blow hard enough to wobble the candle
flame into smoke, just as she too
had blown early-picked dandelions
too young for the seeds to wobble free
and float like spring webbing.
Milk seeping from torn stems,
she wondered if the smell would ever

76
wash clear. Flicking at a drop of rain,
the woman smiles at a puff of white
on the lawn and wonders how a flower
could bring forth a full globe of seeds
in the winter thaw. Jacks.
Her tears hit the table.

77
JOHN, EVEN THE DREAMS
I dream I am picking my way
down a crumbly shell beach
to a motorboat washed up on the peninsula.
Weeds clawing on the metal sides
steady the boat as you hitch
your bad leg over, thump into the stern
behind me. As we move from land,
water yawns into rocks
that can rip long hang nails
from the bottom of our boat.
We skip over the waves
in our wake, over glassy sheet water,
blank as fish eyes. Through
a shallow channel, a grove of stooped
weeping willows, you steer us.
Then, slow as sand through an hourglass,
the boat capsizes, spills us overboard.
We sink like feathers in thick air
to the muddy lake floor, rise
swift as corks until our palms
shove some moonless ceiling.
Dream logic. I shake you,
and lose my one breath in a bubble.
I wake, tense for air,
no full recollections,
only a nagging taste in my mouth
like bread gone stale.

78
My arms grip the pillow
in the shape of your shoulders,
your face vague as bed sheet wrinkles.

79
ALLIANCES
Easily persuaded as changing the subject
in conversation, we believe we are together
is what matters, though we have broken vows
like branches over our knees, again
and again like an ax coming down. I set
the table, dust the bone china
for tea, to hear out your new adventure.
The boredom that sparks appetite
or deadens sense like hearing
on shifting elevations, has driven you
to play puppet to our minds’ wanderings,
both equally sinning. Like a blister
on your instep, the robin we found
under the Chevy hood, we are no longer
surprised at how things happen.
As our marriage putters beyond control,
how careful we are with our bodies
like old linens, that we can feel so little,
the preparations against hunger or cold
so neither enter fully.
We are continually bowing out, no pain
greater than stubbing our toes.
A craving satisfied once—is it enough?
Condemned, you return. Your automatic
running appeal is granted. Sweet James,
this is meant to last.

80
TURNS
“She longed to destroy brutally the past seven years of her life. It was vertigo. A heady,
insuperable longing to fall.” --Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
In the fluorescence of open market, the woman
and her daughters passed tables folding
after a day spent in graffitied parks
of St. Louis. Too weary for adventure,
the eldest at seven, knew the taxi driver
who watched them in his rearview mirror that morning
would not return. A vendor cleaned the woman’s
smoky glasses with a rag, yellow stick of wax,
and his breath, while she cried, foundation slick
on her face. He carried her suitcase, his other arm
around her; she talked in broken English, lipstick.
Daddy, find us.
The crate elevator stopped at the 20th
story,
steps from their $25 room. While the woman
showered, Joe watched the children, circling
like birds around a park bench. He bought hamburgers
later. The woman asked, Are you happy?
as they ate. Joe smiled into the dresser mirror
at the second daughter, peeling glue off the wood
like layers of skin. How would the double
beds be shared?
Murmuring about spots on Joe’s back,
the woman hurried her brood down the stairs,
the elevator slow, close to the communal bath
where Joe washed. He caught up in the lobby,

81
towel draped on a bare shoulder. The woman continued
arguing with the clerk for a refund, the children
leaning their heads against her hips,
the youngest crying, her pants soaked.
The woman settled for use of the phone, dialing
her husband and explaining. They wanted home.
Old men watched from their seats with yellow eyes,
sirens audible on street level.
I know of an ice cream place down the block,
Joe said. Buy them a cone and they’ll be happy.
The woman’s husband drove up in a Ford,
put the children in the back. It’s like shaking
hands only, the woman said, the body mistaken every time.
The things we fall for; the seductive way to move—
away. Joe smiles into that mirror
of gaudy promise.

82
BRIEF CHILDREN
“The farther one traveled, the nakeder one got, until, towards the end, ceasing to be
animated by any scene, one was most oneself, a (wo)man in a bed surrounded by empty
bottles.” --Paul Theroux
I.
I walk with the numbness
of a peripatetic traveler, bumped
like a pinball by the reflective surfaces
of cities. I walk so as not to be owned
by the furniture of a room; the numbers
above a doorway, in the Yellow Pages;
the plaintive telephone voices.
To be hurried is to be victimized by time
the way self-consciousness binds up
the machinery of speech.
Each generation lives the same lives:
a teenager hitches a ride
in one of four directions of a compass;
the girl eliminates the fetus
and shows her belly unscarred
in a bikini; the politician pinches
his lover while his wife waves
at crowds; another animal or flower
becomes extinct without a gasp or sigh
while deep in the woods, hundreds
of undiscovered creatures thrive;
a flag is designed, raised, saluted,
with stars signifying anything;
borders are lines on maps and faces,
but leave not a trench in the earth.

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The only thing to die for—is living.
II.
In a trance, I drift to old haunts
by showy lace and black leather
second-hand shops; grocery stores
smelling of hurry, electrons and floor
polish; used book bins with the sleepy
cat laze; retail clothes outlets
with pumped air and the haughtiness of price
tags—no compromise here. Take it
or leave it. Punks pose and shift:
Make a move on me. The post office
inspires me, imagining the destinations
of cherished letters licked shut
and sent off like homing pigeons.
A universal beggar signals with open hand:
I’ll give you a piece of myself
for a look spare change. Sometimes
I wonder at Blessing’s admonishment:
“Think of the lives you’re burning
to survive,” and realize my body is borne
on the flesh of others: only
in society do I have any weight.
I think of my son,
whom I’ve sent away to nursery
in order that I may
bear the weight of his entirety.
A part of my soul excludes him
to make way. How can ink
for one moment substitute for the rushing
blood of a living force—yet

84
that’s what I leave him for: that sacred
calligraphy; that child’s play; those lies round
with insinuation; those words moving actors
and audience in unison; those hymns
praising God. Lepers disown a limb
once the deadened nerves stop feeling.
That is the lesson which guides:
let the feeling continue, even
if it’s only pain. In my black hood,
I’m not one for vicarious living.
Resignation is not will
for those whose lives are filled
with the acts and spaces of others
in cities raised by the dead, some
having more power in absence.
Someday, this boy-love will leave me
without a flutter of conscience.
I will keep walking, as now—
without getting farther nor closer,
without destination, but merely
through one green light after another.
What fills my heart
doesn’t change my pace
but for the faces in doorways.

85
HOW TO READ THE POEM SHE WROTE FOR YOU
(For R.T.)
Shade this love poem over with pencil
for an outline: a breast.
A goblet. Read it, Roy,
like a riddle, an anecdote, or consider it
seriously as you would an article.
Let it ferment for a month, then snap
open like a can of biscuits. Shake it;
something may fall out: a bookmark,
splat of wine. Turn it on your frayed knee
patch; fold this page into a boat or plane.
Watch it float and fly. Press
It under ultraviolet light or water.
Tap it. It may spit
out a pebble, a pit, a pearl.
Splay your fingers into a rake
and let the words tumble like rice
onto them. Drop this onto concrete
or stand it up on end
to see which way it falls.
All two hundred and sixty eight pieces
are here, revealing
what the poet has decided your fate
is to be. She draws you in the shapes
she finds pleasing, makes fiction
to suit her. Reading her poem
may be like looking at your face
in a carnival mirror, for she will show
angles from blind spots,

86
reveal places where your skin is soft
as an eyelid, rough as her tongue,
show you in cellar light or make up
dialogue for you like a lie,
“Anna. Anna.”
Start reading by bracing yourself
against her back door. If you find
her poem empty as an urn,
with words missing or misspelled,
flat as poured champagne,
stretching out like a couch, then go
to her, Roy. She will tell you.

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DOMESTICITY: DAPHNE AND APOLLO
Winged Daphne, I follow. Hear me.
My prayer is immortality: endless chance.
The ground is a wheel under us.
I touch your skirt.
Father! The bird of prey plummets,
cleaves the earth. Rivergod Peneus,
possessive father, I curse you.
What have you done? I, Lord of Delphi,
am humbled. The race is drawn.
Hair crackled into leaf, Daphne,
you’re transfigured by fear
into this parody of love: mute and rooted.
Virgin laurel, wood nymph, you bow
only to wind, give only to air.
You’re anonymous in this forest
of old triumphs, obedient
to another law, ringed by moats.
I’m empty as the moment I saw you,
my silence pierced like a membrane
by your laughter. My hands grope
for that other rain, as leaves,
in the umbra of your shade.
I’ll wander, my splintered heart
a graft to your body, continually
replanting your frozen seed.
I’ll scoop a stream to your feet;
feed on your sap, black stone berries;
color and scent my face with you—
evergreen. In fall, I’ll prune
your blind, reaching branches,

88
strike a match to the cuttings.
Finally: a woman in flames.

89
LOOKING FOR THE CATALYST
“Many astounded on peaks/ were left with their memories, except one/ who held some
power over me.” --Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge, For the Tails of Comets
I tap ash into your warm cola;
another day sopped into the ground.
We are hot and cold air circling.
Come on. I want whatever kept us.
What’s urgent is to answer the phone
before the machine.
You rub my stomach, the chalky scar
that birthed another man’s daughter.
Are you afraid of me?
You leave your cast of blankets
ask from the window
”Do you hear kids outside?”
A plane shimmers the air.
Don’t worry. I light a cigarette.
I’ve got a lot of control.
Someone guns an engine in the lot
behind the dumpsters.
The iron steams the blouse spottily.
What should I wear?
An engineer in Palo Alto tells me,
No, sweet. I pray
because his denial
shot the vista of night.

90
COMFORT FOR A MUSE
(for R.T.)
This is home though he’s stayed away a year.
He undresses while she waits with paints, inks,
to recreate him.
Her son suckles clumsily; milk dribbles.
She’s magically borne another man’s child
while he circled.
It’s no consolation that he’s her sole muse,
that posterity belongs to her who’s loved him,
that she credits him by name,
that some of their collaborations will last beyond
a human life. His freedom is absolute as sky—
to find love as a full shell
among rocks, father children like kites to let soar,
make a wife from any number of lovers.
He could leave, knowing
a muse bears a kind of fertility. Yet,
she’s irreparably typecast him, refused
to acknowledge his grief. He poses
with his hands out to protest the men
who’ve cluttered her bed like newspapers.
He holds his groin to mourn the infinite
seeds mixed in sand. He crouches like a beggar
to symbolize his neglect. He points to accuse her
of betraying her self. He shakes
his fists at life continuing around their stasis,
like water around a rock. He circles his arms
to show her absence.
Monkey with an audience, he rocks an imaginary cradle.
Then stops. She knows.

91
“Sam,” she says. He rests his head
on her bony, sodden lap.

92
THE SEAMSTRESS
A man and a seamstress: he, outside,
she working inside on all manner of cloth—
shrouds, flags, trousers, diapers,
curtains. Night sustains the illusions
that daytime leaves bare. A candle
and the steam iron warm the room,
seal the windows in translucence.
The man cannot bear her solitude.
The seamstress has been seduced
and knows all the ways, become true
only to her emotions—her freedom
garnered by needle and thread.
Hers is a beauty which leaves men
inconsolable. In the wash of days,
her widowhood will cleanse him
of his impurity, the liaisons
ending so jaggedly.
She has been celibate and mourning
long enough to be reborn a virgin.
The black mourning veil,
like unmistakable stretch marks
of an illegitimate birth, help her
stay honest to the dead.
Each day contains a fatal possibility,
every capitulation two-edged. To succumb
is to turn the world upside-down,
the mistress turned wife, actions
crusting into history like stains.
Not fearing death means life is worthless.
Giving in to every whim

93
means one lives like a leaf decomposing
in a stream. Urges forgotten
mean one lives like a rock, turning numb
to the world of green, of mint.
He, a man who wants only a few good meals,
a few bitter drinks, admires and hates
those incapable of living in captivity,
who die in a heap like fools, while
their executioners jangle keys.
Her soul, disengaged, soars away.
The other women settle into quietude,
there for the choosing.
The seamstress measures and cuts, stitches
and adjusts, matches and mixes,
patches and mends. She knots the strings,
pulls layers together. The flowing line
of hem, the perfect fit, she looks up
through the 4’x 4’ window. She sees a man
in need of a coat against the wind,
and calculates: six yards of wool.

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PARALLELS
If we had not met like perpendicular lines
across the racquetball courts, only,
slipped like gears back into neutral,
where would we be? Both unaware
of missing, lost between words
settling like ash in the pits of your lungs.
So much time making
and breaking connections. There are those
missed like a taken taxi, fast bus,
connections we couldn’t make like our son
asking, “What’s the cross between a snake
and a toaster?”, the cross between a one-year-old
girl and a plastic cereal bowl, her face
suctioned, sucking and suffocating
while her mother talked on the phone
a kick away. Connections we see
people hurrying to on the street, nothing
as dramatic as pinball lights, door-to-door
mindless as walking. As if connecting
the dots would create a final image.
So what if we did not run
parallel, would there be a gap
we could not fill in our minds,
fill by moving quickly or with lovers?
Or like a racquetball and racquet,
would we veer off some far wall
or spin, winded with torque
Against some polished, painted floor?

95
TO BE A PARENT IS THAT BODILY PRAYER
(for Rodin Max)
for immortality, but not
outliving the child. It’s to accommodate
as with stretch marks; sustain
as with the sweet, thin breast milk
reiterating the connection,
mother and child, remarkable and basic
as the daily solar revolution.
To be parent is to be wary of even trees
for their potential in storms
and play; be elemental as water;
be fatigued as soldiers
on the long march; be held in thrall
by the tooth rising like the moon,
a viscous web of saliva,
the hands moving the breast—he,
already taking what he needs
and shaping what’s given him.
To be parent is to console while knowing
days will come when our words are gibberish,
our bodies dry. It’s to trust
that the earth will provide for those
who give back to soil as peanuts.
To be parent is to be brought back
to the triumph of birth—the arched back,
curved neck; to the soul’s adjustment
to the body; the awkwardness of sleeves;
scent of mother—blood and milk;
the inertia of tantrums.

96
To be parent means knowing a child
is a stranger with our features;
a child confers the title of parenthood;
a child is repayment of our infinite debt
owed for our lives; is our bid for the future
and a bridge to our ancestors,
just as the sky and earth meet
at the horizon. To be parent is to find
comfort, knowing some species have gone
through a thousand life cycles in our time
and yet survive, indestructible.
A parent learns to move on
without fear as a child takes his
first wobbly step forward.

97
MUSIC AND LIGHT: A WEDDING TOAST FOR EMILY
“Marriage is a science.” --Honore de Balzac
I lift the glass, ease back, and swallow.
A toast to your retreat into one name,
in this bright, white-flounced display.
A witness to your induction
into that class
of the much-loved, responsible. An observation
that there’ll be no abacus, scale, ruler or cup
to measure what’s gained and lost
in this exchange. A lament
that success is marked
by years alone, because when humans
are only mud figures crumbling in the sun
the one money is time.
A prayer of the faithless
on this Sunday, as you stumble
from the church in rain that is only red confetti:
Let there be no reason—least love—
for your choices today, so when
the need to justify arises,
you answer in the voice
of the doubter, even if she is yourself.
Repeat these vows until they’re familiar
as Dominic in dreams. It will not
be a trial to keep his love
rather your own. Let him be
that one object you focus on, until your eyes blur,
re-adjust. Happenings like a bus careening
around a corner, we’re never quite prepared
nor blessed with boundaries

98
or lined streets. The darkness
so complete that we imagine light, the silence
so profound that we invent music.
Though your maiden name exists like fallback
like your proud father behind you,
you must dive in up to the hilt
as this knife in cake. You are the ones who will
last, with Godly sanction.
Let children roll forth, union
of blood and chance. Let the years
build like bricks, without
the examination of love trinkets, for marriage reconstructs
like a patchwork quilt. Stay stubborn
as seed. Keep yourself closed
pure, private, in awe.
Make this marriage the altar
You bring your gifts to.
Let nothing end the flowers of this garden,
or leave footprints. Keep the grounds
so empty and silent that you look
to yourselves for amazement
and find it.

99
KISS
(for the men)
A man follows
a woman’s infinite red scarf, ties it
to trees in passing.
The fibers become inseparable from the trunks,
become cocoons again. Maze of red silk,
beauty, at this level, is asexual.
He says to his wife: When I am with you,
I am with her. When he is with her,
he is lost to this world and the next,
somewhere in the void
of sky, the abyss of earth
rapture and disgust
where she leaves him at will.
To his wife: I return to you, Comfort.
He creeps back into the dissolving
tunnel of sleep. She hesitates in flight.
She is naked and invulnerable, shrugs.
Eizen’s courtesan Chodayu powders
tracks left by tears, while April moon
drifts above the clouds’ migration.
In her kimono of pink storks, explosive
flowers to keep him in the mood
of fertility, she is a bird out of season.
Chickadees on the sheets chatter
in another tongue. The lacquer tray displays
food—not the sustenance but the intimacy.
His robe is laid out, the rice wine warmed.
Calling her mistress creates the passion.

100
Chodayu stands like a child in bare feet.
The aphrodisiac is sadness.
Crouched, he will lick her toes.
White light, black velvet,
she leans her lizard head back, wary sleeper,
watches the man through slits
as he dips his fingers into shadow and strobe,
her breasts sweet with intent.
The ebony stones set in Dali’s shit gold
around her neck stare, the eyes of flies.
Time is a spider. From within the mirror,
something watches, that presence
as when people make love on a round carpet
beneath that silvered glass.
The rub: her skin and the pelts
of predators. Be still. He tries for a scent—
perfume and smoke. He breathes her exhalations;
she breathes his cries and bites him.
Hundreds travel the route
the killer of prostitutes drives to meet
his match and dump the carcasses.
Every car is a hearse. The spark of soil
is a piece of woman’s hair. The bodies are newsprint,
soaking. Where to? asks the taxi driver.
From all directions come the girls and the women
like tumbleweeds. From all directions
come the men
to save, arrest, watch, buy, fantasize,
fall in love, beat, sell, fight, smoke with

101
her, and then to take her
into the woods.
I feel an old lover
who stayed a handful of nights, years
in whispering dreams. Somewhere in exquisite
light, he breathes. His hand has marked my chest
like a leaf on concrete. He shortens my shadows,
fogs the windows. Crows dive
at my white hairs. My shoes have holes from the erratic trails
of butterflies. I find substitutes like toes
for fingers. He is inspiration unsullied
by expression. In our floating world,
my heart is whole but shaggy with splinters.
A name to the wind.

102
YOURS, RICK
Tonight, weary Guiso, you sleep beside me.
A man whistles under our window.
My fingers pace your spine. Under the blankets
you smell of oil and kidskin
leather. I comb your hair, coarse
with the whiskey you poured
when I picked you up at the depot.
Four weeks, this time, before you called.
The morning you left, Guiso, I played
your new synthesizer, the ribbons
still on it, flipped on drums and drums
so I could not hear you sing, “Miles
gives me—“ down the stairs.
When I brought you back, you said,
“It doesn’t matter, these affairs.”
“I’m content,” I said. You made dinner,
bought plants for the north sill, washed
in the shower. I hung up the coat
you took the $50 from. Young Guiso,
I know each time one of your other lovers
falter, each time I buy you a gift,
show you in public,
you tire under my love.

103
THE FACE OF MY ASSASSIN
Each uneventful day spent alone
brings me closer
to the face of my assassin
whom I will see in broad daylight
bearing a bouquet of thirsty irises.
Who knows what brews in our oblivious state?
What number the offenses of our flesh?
Anticipation rests like a razor
on my tongue. A close call tastes of blood.
A man could walk whole
but broken inside. For the tumescent young cannibals,
hesitancy is a setback. Each new figure carries
the fragrance of danger, arousal
as simple as the flick of an eyelash
or a lighter. An old lover
may be air-brushed out of the inconvenient past
along with the legions of the dead, who are good company.
The balance may be upset any moment
from any direction, but the only siege
is in the mind.
Bodies couple and uncouple like train cars
moving off onto their respective tracks.
Ours is a sleepwalk between beds
with a scarce moment to ask: With whom
was love a hoax? Who will arbitrate
in these private courts? For what
am I liable?
A man says if he fucks me, he fucks China.
Love is a jigsaw vision, guerrilla warfare,
the junkyard of grief and dispersion,

104
a barrage of synopses firing on the execution ground,
the late winter ravages on spring buds,
all semantics, all politics.
I could ruin my beauty
to be free of you,
but I could not erase this want.
Another day shapes itself from the dust.
In the distance, coming into shape, something.

105
LAND OF MUTATIONAL ARTISTS—PART IV
LAND OF MUTATIONAL ARTISTS
(Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, PRC, 1989)
Artists are as daring as their leaders
allow. They probe flesh wounds like doctors
fearful of misstep. “Coward” is too harsh
a word, where the punishment is swift
decisive as a bullet, the invisible gavel.
Artists learn by osmosis these new terms:
obsequiousness becomes intelligence.
They are worn down by the daily impossibilities—
water dripping, translucency without clarity.
Painted nudes reflect their clothed shame.
Colors blend into mud with the restless stirring.
Statures remain in stone,
fail to rise from sand. Bodies do not lie
pressed to the earth in ecstasy. Days drop
like pebbles in a bin.
Artists fall over in the stupor of wine,
their longings evaporating through the smoke
of cigarettes, their hearts crushed
by a belly full of meat, the models escaping
before dawn in tawdry rags with money.
Even the artists’ drum-beating patrons
are chameleons, chanting in the streets
one day, retreating the next, their faces
protected from the tear gas of their own fears.
Artists are like pack mules who wear the blinders
of their masters. Rich beggars mutilate
their children for money. Babies are born

106
with cleft palate and struggle to say I.
Leaders are mistaken for God and are worshipped
morning and night. People say, Long
live god,” while unaware of the contradiction.
The urges of the Muse become more hospitable
with age. Artists thrill and titter
at the small gestures, like children shrieking
away from a broken window.
Words are museum pieces celebrating the safe
dead past , ravaging the safe dead leaders
for old crimes, singing rhetoric,
commemorating the living dead.

107
STROKE ORDER
(for Dr. Zhou Xiao Ming, my teacher)
Wildness expressed in
compression, characters creep
from box graphs. I seek
a hook to etch memory.
A child learns language with ease.
I struggle the mind
from new habits to reach old
ways: not A, B, C,
but cave marks, drawings, and words
evolving through styles, cursive
complex. You say, “Male
consists of field-strength.” Nan rhymes
with hardship: male and
difficulty are the same.
Characters stand testament
while humans lie, shout,
laugh, mumble, whisper, bargain,
in dialect of Heilongjiang,
Beijing, Hunan, Yunnan…
Nasal, tonal, high
and low, Chinese adapts to
the speakers—at last
count—one billion five hundred
million. To be ignorant
of an ancestor’s tongue

108
is to trample on graves,
play deaf, forget one’s birthright,
deny the losses
our parents bear to have us.
Wo xiang xue zhongwen.
Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi,
Ba, jiu, shi, shi-yi…
The acquisition of words
one-by-one, is agony,
like moving a dead
limb to increase blood flow and feeling.
One day, I will know the proper words
tones emotion to say Xie xie.
Notes
Wo xiang xue zhongwen. I want to study Chinese.
Yi, er, san, si,…shi yi… 1, 2, 3, 4…11
Xie xie. Thank you.

109
THE SAME HAND
(June 3 – 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square, Beijing, PRC)
Is there anyone
to carry this load off of me, away?
When I visit you, do I not still hold up
your child to my heart, and let
our warmth mingle? Take it all.
It’s all worthless to me now.
Don’t bring cheap wines to numb
my mind, and silence my tongue.
Do not bring rotten meats to build up
my old flesh. My embodiment of time
standing still, my rope knotted
to the infinite future, fruit of marriage,
warmth in old age, my beloved innocent
has disappeared in the treacherous year
of the Snake, which has swallowed all,
slithered away swollen.
Firecrackers like horse’s hooves
in my brain remind me of the last
sounds he must have heard as he fell
marveling at the sun rising before dawn,
before the noodle stalls opened
with his favorite meal, so simple.
You are above me
beyond my laughter or my disdain,
wholly beyond my reach or voice.
I have bowed to your will my whole life;
labored to pay taxes; sung the anthems;
repeated your praises, which I learned

110
in school. As animal or demon—
whatever you have become—did you forget
wo da si ni is only a threat
out of the nursery? Did you forget
to lighten the slap before it landed?
Were their sweet demanding voices
impossible to bear? You, who clothed
and fed us poorly, for all our toil,
continue to write policies, levy taxes.
Your same hand which wrote the death
certificates are writing a storybook
history with no correlation.
You print stamps and money to glorify
this human machine you’ve built.
Someone else wears my son’s clothes,
sleeps in his bed. No one will hold up
his banners, begging democracy,
for shame.
Let the wise blank out the impulses
from their broken hearts, become automatons.
Our eyes are not to see;
our ears are not to hear; we become
entombed in ourselves, our bodily processes.
Let the scholars coldly debate the small points:
the size and speed of bullets;
if helicopters were present or not to airlift
human cargo; if some textbook theory
was disproved or not; whether Leader A
spoke with Leader X, and when.
Let the guards determine not who saw,

111
but who will tell what was witnessed
by their whited eyes. Let the accountants
worry over the cost of a few burnt out
train cars, and bill the correct offices.
Let the crematorium workers toss up
handfuls of dust in illegal wakes.
Let the impure ashes be mixed into the bricks
by bricklayers who mend the bullet-riddled streets.
Let the international bureaucrats
condone by silence or play hocus-pocus
with words to protect contracts and trade,
each with their own master plan
that demands co-conspirators in high places.
Let those—drugged or sober—who held
the weapons or drove tanks this-and-that-a-way
over their own (the slush and pop)
forget—and be destroyed from the outside.
Let those who screwed in light bulbs
to film the carnage for their careers,
or who wrote the happy lies for mass
consumption, all go their merry ways.
Let the mathematicians calculate, so many years
per life “x” potential “x” and years lost “x”
7,000 years in an hour of wrath.
The survivors bear the rocks which crushed
the dead, because they must bear,
because they are the dying. Let them smoke
one cigarette after another into clouds
of forgetfulness, hanging over yellowed faces
and gutted insides. Let them eat

112
bitterness, for the flavor contorts faces
into a semblance of a smile.
Only, wo de shang di, let those speak
who lay shrouded in burlap in makeshift morgues,
shrouded in a red-starred flag,
who were so far away from family, but
who were too close to the soiled gates
of heavenly peace.
Notes
Wo da si ni means “I’ll kill you.” It is a common threat of Chinese parents or
grandparents towards their young charges into order to scare them into obedience. Wo de
shang di means “My God.” Tianamen Square means “Gate of Heavenly Peace Square.”

113
GLASS WALLS
(from Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, P.R.C., 1988 – 1990)
In a state of siege, I am
living and breathing while watched.
This omniscient body of citizens
wins prizes for what they report.
My garbage is fluffed
for counter-revolutionary papers daily,
by a smiling “maid” who does little else.
Windows have been placed above the doors,
so there is not a crevice hidden from view,
every sound captured within echoing
stone walls. She knows how many
cigarettes my neighbor smoked; the exact
stains in another’s underwear; the photos
of friends and relatives; the gossip
coming from the Foreign Affairs Office.
We foreigners bribe her because we see
her face, like a nosy mother’s
except she reports to the omnipotent
Ministry of Public Security.
Our foreign status justifies all measures
against us. We are not “the people”
who must be kept untainted.
We rage against the invisible readers
of our mail. They steam open and re-glue
missives, aerogrammes; roll out love letters
from centimeter-long slits. Sometimes a foreign stamp
vanishes and reappears in someone’s collection.
We write home, “Keep the stamps ugly.

114
Write nothing of God because He is political.”
We might get mail intact that way.
We imagine the lewd, chain-smoking bureaucrat
gloating over the latest find, translating
into Chinese for the amusement
of colleagues. The faceless are more intimate
than jealous lovers, endlessly digging.
The questions are a daily routine:
“Where are you going?” “Out.”
“When will you return?” “Sooner. Or later.”
“Be here for all three meals.” “I know.”
“Who just visited you?” “A student.”
“Will you student come again?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know.”
The laying of eyes on a thing
causes it to become dirtied, as if
numerous sweaty palm prints had smudged it.
We second-guess the interpreter of motives.
We become censors of our actions—to reinterpret
ourselves for outsiders. We send out ink clouds
like octopuses to confuse those tracking us.
We do little else
because we’re being done to.

115
ARTIFICIAL DAY
(Nanchang, Jiangxi Province, PRC 1988-90)
Loudspeakers begin the day.
Children raise their right arms in an arc
while a class monitor marks the names
of those who fail to show proper reverence
to State. Special bulletins announce
the artificial day—quadruple-speak
to serve the government, boss, spirits,
and whomever may be watching and willing
to report, be it family, friend, comrade
or stranger. People murmur above
the electronic voices to pacify their hearts,
to slow its nervous thud. Operatives conjure
their dark power, under cover of a black sky.
Here is a call to revolution
because citizens chant in unison: I have
done something but don’t know why.
The loudspeakers said to put one foot
in front of the other. One mistaken gesture
costs a life, caught in wet cement prisons,
or an executioner who stands behind
to pump a bullet into the skull base,
not by 1-2-3 mercy, but on whim.
Half the fun is in the guesswork, shadow-play.
Policies are written by leaders attacking
each other to stay in power, not to the innumerable
laborers and peasants below, whose heads
are scabby from scraping the floor in obeisance
to foam gods. Nothing can be committed

116
to heart, because of the quicksand shifts in policy,
a thousand versions of history, depending.
Status quo is human-made, no mandate of heaven.
Revolution is not the barrel of a gun
but a turn of mind. A mind born in captivity
flutters within its own boundaries.
Technology reaches tentacles into the universe
while humans vanish into the black hole
of ancient power struggles, individuals whittled
to a knob. A toast, another toast to anything
different. Is there anyone to make the day
before the ink dries into history
from another sun settled into immutability?
Heroes’ faces on banners should be composites.
Our duty is not to name then but be true
to the cause, as if we were continually center stage,
as if the trenches were drawn across our own souls.
While in the grip, we must protect
what little is gained; honor the illiterate
who speaks; the dumb who signs; the beggar
who shares his meal; the witness who speaks;
the official who defects. Let them teach
the beginner, who is startled by his croak,
phlegm of disuse.
The beginner thinks that without a uniform,
She is no one. The beginning asks,
Have I done anything wrong?
The beginner vanishes behind identification
numbers, mass statistics, prefers to be just another
face peering through barred windows

117
into his own courtyard, at the washings
not the happening street. Outside,
what is it like? citizens ask wistfully,
incapable of outrage at the discrepancies. Inside…
they laugh. It costs less to smile
and is safer, in the sun-lit night
where every gesture is witnessed and holds
some meaning for officials to interpret.
Tongzhi, tongzhi, where are you?
Note:
Tongzhi means “comrade” in the Mandarin dialect of Chinese.

118
EXISTENCE IN VAGUE
(for the martyrs, June 3 – 4, 1989, PRC)
In this performance
there are no soloists, only icons
the rest choristers chanting the refrain
goodness-obedience the highest attainment
people of the red soil
chalk beings each a brain cell
testing out a mass idea
in motion, amoeba-like, the direction
beyond anyone
terra-cotta soldiers begin their march
into oblivion as they leave their mother soil
trampled disinterred
tombs of mummy kings
poets and intellectuals duel with pens
while the players and pawns
spill blood over ink into the river
the alibi is spontaneity
but nature allows no rootless flower
including the floating lotus
there’s a place for the flutist
perched on the temple mount
who sees the scarred terraced hills
as veined leaves
the language of earth from high
clear air distorting the wind
a voice while filth below sustains
cities mushroom on shit
there’s a place for the street sweeper
gray head wrapped in kerchief

119
against the dust she raised
which the wind lets settle
to meet the bristles of her broom
there’s a place for the albino
who walks at night
while the moon doesn’t echo
the white disgrace
there’s a place for all in fluidity
where most go through the motions
choose a task, a niche—dig in
for a cycle, a life
where it’s better to be well-honed
like a dowel than well-rounded
like a stone at the bottom
of Yellow River
which will outlast the winding
Great Wall which crumbles
troops of bugling insects die
come fall no clear note floats
but a hum of green rice in rows
singular and infinite
the untended weeds in ditches
for geese from the gut of earth
another retching that spills
into the laps
of the molten ones

120
FIRST BATH
(for Zhou Ping, the Three Roses Lady)
She had
her first bath in a full-length tub
that morning after
in the hotel that catered to white ghosts.
Getting to that point
wasn’t so easy, the experienced girls
ahead of her. Her speech
was a general approximation of English
enough to entertain the way
her girlish rice-fed body was a guess
at womanhood. The first time
he clutched a cup in his crotch
out in the open where people could see
but he was looking at her.
She wanted to pretend
his thoughts lay elsewhere that night,
old fool, and foreign, too.
He called me names
without meaning except in other languages.
The soap was not harsh but perfumed
and wrapped in paper. She lay
her head on one end of the tub
her feet not touching the other.
A residue clung to the water level
of rust and untold layers
of skin. His hair was curled
like a woman’s. He smelled of cologne
and meat, fat, overseas cigarettes.

121
He was my first, I his hundredth.
What changed hands, hands changing?
A month’s wages in dollars, twenty
green ones.

122
STRIKE
(In praise of Elena Bonner and Andrei Sakharov)
“The world’s fame is like smoke—“ --Poet Anna Akhmatova
You are undeviating memory
the blueprint for humanity
in contrast to the living world
each day an opportunity taken or lost
your house is the soul
your place the courthouse
of pre-written judgments, the gavel
a slap of the whip
the assigned concrete apartment a cage
imbedded with the latest technology
for surveillance, the windows
open for cameras, the hallway
crowded with beds for guards
the KGB rules the temporal earth
but affect nothing of your love
for generations of children
for country, you, more patriots
than all the police who wave the flag
to smother the citizenry, lives underfoot
churches survive through their bearers
alive in the heart when every last
sacred stone has been ground to dust
reshaped into national idols
strangers smuggle out the writings
an underground network of dissidents
the radio a lifeline, jammed, static-ridden
the body fails, the heart clogged
with sweet butter and cream,

123
the lungs puffed with ash—only the spirit
lasts in purity you write the books
on conscience
Elena, not “dissident” only woman honest
to life; Andre, father of the hydrogen bomb academician
converted lamb to peace
government writes its version
libel and propaganda, heroes turned demons,
to satisfy pagan hearts
all the battles of humanity are waged
individually in the heart
if a recalcitrant child is forbidden food
a populace starves because a ruler
wants to flush the rebels
if the voices of children cannot be heard
above the din of parents,
totalitarianism rules
if a child is terrorized by violence
a population is controlled by fascism
if a child prostitutes himself or herself
a country has been sold into corruption
if one dead person is forgotten
a nation has vanished into oblivion
humans bear no guilt for the dead
who have no spokesperson to express
supernatural rage
the madness of hornets
what is social position if unused
for popular betterment? If one man
eats caviar while a thousand kin starve
for lack of gruel?

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