Legacy
The piano is out of tune with the ages
of neglect, a layer of dust colonizing on
top of the keys, so that every note
reverberates through the air heavy
with heat—dry, thieving Saharan heat
that trades water for a brew of
dread and desperation, and poor to taste—
and settles—
in the cracking cement walls,
in the three rusting green metal bars
on the window, just the one, as if
burglars would find value in the
wrinkled leather couch that still smells
like my grandmother, or the canvas of the
Coptic church down the street she painted
two of: the other for the church itself and her
allies, her friends, within it,
whose haven has endured
alongside her own—
this house that has seen four generations.
There is dust on my fingers now
but I don’t wipe it off;
there is no one left to walk
these halls, to climb the curved, narrow steps
to the roof and watch the hot orange sun
settle into dusk, and listen to the call to prayer,
which is unintelligible to me but still musical,
and attempt to translate the graffiti
that lines the wall across the street
like hieroglyphics,
a forgotten wanderer’s shot at storytelling
(the moral: I was here), and count
how many strays live in the bushes and
commiserate with those
who call the streets their home.
The green-shuttered doors wave a farewell,
a salute to me, the last generation.
uncertainty
we live
body to body—Marco
Polo walked through deserts
and wooed fine women
at the age of seventeen
like an atom (once conceived
as grains of sand in a bag)
bounding through silk and air
his hair and hers.
mingling, we find reason to exist
in the mirror of heat
in the swirl of misunderstanding that defines
pieces of us: protons deconstructed
in quivering quarks—freedom
of will follows from
quantum uncertainty?
but restless, we roam the streets
like wind-blown threads—
powerless before the chemical bursts
shivering the brain;
hunger leaving welts on the skin—
stigmata—
blessed voids where strangers fit
and where names
replace homes as comfort.
(from an ancestor visited by a medicine man in a dream)
It smells like dusk in here.
Again.
It smells like
that moment before, when the sun
refuses. Closes its eyes
and pretends the world is still.
You come in, stumbling, trampling
against a moth-eaten doorframe—
hold open your palms, without defiance
or honor or guilt, even. A greeting,
let's say. In this place, too deathless for words,
you, impassive, sacrifice your hands for a hello
as you have before, lifetimes of martyred veins
gathered, like letters in a post office, precariously
stacked, ready to blow away.
And I have my own message to send through you,
that you have swallowed so often that
it cuts into your blood:
“Tell them that I am here, waiting
for them.” But you wander off,
as you must, for other messages,
other hands, only to return,
centuries of returns without replies,
too repetitive for routine.
I said to you once that before we are born,
we know that we are destined to die.
You held open your palms, without assent,
and left.
What’s Left to See?
In the end I’ve got who I’ve got, I’ve taken what I’ve reaped; my silence is my choice and my will is my determinism
at least, what I swear to believe in.
If I tell I will tell who I’ll tell, and if not why not wait ‘til I burst apart anyway,
Explosions are best when grand, beautiful, solitary, dramatic, colorful.
Remember stories you used to tell a distant girl?
There was the monkey by the red-dust-dawn street roads
And it found by its side a spaceship with a note
Reading: “I can take you up, but I’ll never let you down.”
And since the sky was so pure, iridescent, orange
Since the streets were filled with so much rubble
And the monkey was utterly free, alone
It climbed aboard
They flew into the sky
Past that monochrome haze
And just as the monkey saw the ocean-like beauty of space
It all burst into rainbows of color
Pressure failed and everything collapsed
The rainbows fell into the monkey, and his spaceship
Became a tiny orb, a glowing red emotion
Falling through the sky
It smelled faintly like the fourth floor of an old Brooklyn apartment building
Where my grandmother smiles and I was born.
The Difference the Sun Makes
“Recalling that the boundary survey team of 1853 had scouted the canyon, then sent an empty boat through but that 'no two planks came out together,' Nevill and his party decided that not everyone should risk a canyon that local Mexicans described as 'utterly impassable.'”
-The Big Bend: A History of the Last Texas Frontier by Ronnie C. Tyler
Camp Misery, Texas
No two planks came out together. I laughed when they said it,
and they say it now, and I laugh because I fear. Because I fear fear.
What will it do to me? What will it make me do? Will I show the face
I wish to cover around the others? But curiosity cannot destroy
what has not answered me: What can destroy in that canyon?
What is it that destroys?
Paso Lajitas, Chihuahua, Mexico
I turn over in my sleep sometimes
and my arm lands across her pudgy midsection,
and she squirms
from the attention,
loving it,
even when it is you I dream of. I feel guilty when she wakes
smiling in the morning.
She was dreaming, too.
There is nothing my body can do that it does not expect.
I turn over and feel either her on one side, or fall into myself
on the other. I once used to meet you when I turned over,
soft and warm in its place. Never have I seen anything that would
bruise beneath the moon.
Camp Misery, Texas
I count down the hours until I'm to know whether I will die
here or somewhere else in Texas.
I don't have a pocket watch down here and I use the sun to tell
me what it can about the world everyone
else must be living. The Arbuckles is the kitchen I am missing.
The campfires are the stoves I might never see again.
The rocks that push against the straw-lined cushion
I use for my head
are the hands against my face I will miss.
The things we might miss. I never cared much for those things.
Paso Lajitas, Chihuahua, Mexico
The house is quiet in the mornings and I can never tell
if the sound I do hear is the house and the fence settling into itself,
this life getting to know the ground beneath it,
or else the fat rats I've seen scurrying across the fields
while lying beneath the lone Mesquite, to burrow
in the horse feed we keep near the back door.
Perhaps they have gotten in.
One kettle boils enough hot water for a shave
and I do not recognize the lathered man in the mirror.
Was he the same one who once made love to you
among the rocks and the scorpions?
Did he once hold the small of your back
so the back of his hand would scrape
against the limestone points
while his palm rubbed into your aloe skin
to keep it safe?
Camp Misery, Texas
My feet are wet and have been for three days.
My throat's gone hoarse from holding
my breath every time another
bend appears in the river.
I see boulders in the path–
or what might appear to be a boulder.
It's boulder enough to get me praying
for a safe way out of here, despite
what means He us to see. I think
of the words again:
No two planks came out together.
And I wonder what the Good Lord was thinking
when he set to creating this gap in the king range
of maroon mountains, like a smile missing
the biggest left front tooth. Or what he was thinking
when he put it in the heart of man that he could control
the rivers, that the mountains would yield to him.
We can just about control only what we can hold,
and not much more.
The other men keep exploring.
Paso Lajitas, Chihuahua, Mexico
The horse bridle leather frays while I put it on Maysa.
She cringes under the burden I've put on her back.
We trot to meet the herds we'll be feeding together
and beneath me, she knows my dreams. She knows
how I married you against your parents' wishes,
those of your brothers.
It was a beautiful evening.
We ate cake layered with the prickly pear jam
I make in August, when the Sun becomes
the harshest thing to outlive.
The Sun is a pendulum marking the afternoon,
the progression of this life spent recalling
my submerged dreams of you. My dreams
are like rain answered by prayers,
the voice reaching an ear after traversing the canyon,
the echo in my chest finally finding a mouth.
Camp Misery, Texas
The men down here don't seem to care much about getting back.
Ranger Nevill doesn't care much about anything
and smokes like a tipi on the prairie,
while the doctor doesn't care about nothing more than the rocks,
and touches them like he would a newborn baby girl.
One of the other rangers thinks I'm worrying too much
and am bringing the others worry too,
like a sickness.
He says it's mostly been a smooth
nice, even,
ride.
He thinks we were all wrong
to imagine 7000 foot drops
or rock pits round every turn,
or Mexican bandits surviving
off the feed of others.
But he doesn't believe the worst because he doesn't have the faith.
It takes a certain kind to know a thing like that could happen.
Paso Lajitas, Chihuahua, Mexico
It's dark soon enough,
and in my dream I made love to you in the darkness.
Out here,
the sky becomes blackened night quickly,
and you can hardly see the circle of angels
entrusted to guard you.
But over beyond the mountains,
I can see a patch of blueberry sky,
the effects of the sun on a place where night has not set.
Are you living there?
Are you
there
and can you see the night
I now see?
Camp Misery, Texas
The canyon rim is struck by afternoon sun and I feel like I'm at the round barrel bottom,
down where the dreg and spittle ferment.
The men who are watching us from atop the canyons cannot hear what we shout up to them,
nor can we hear what they shout down to us.
They can see the tops of the birds
that try flying up to the ledge,
but who tire after solid attempts
and always fall back down.
We only see the birds that fly higher
and higher and disappear
into the sides of the mountains.
The sun shines
out there
and it must be twenty degrees warmer.
I wish
I were there, at the rim of the canyon.
If I were there
I would not be afraid.
I'd ably see reward in all of this.
Not ask for sweet forgiveness every time
we turn a corner, encounter a rocky point.
Instead, I'd ably do the things that need forgiving.
Here! Another bend is here.
Paso Lajitas, Chihuahua.
The horse wants sleep nearly as much as I do
and we ride back toward the house.
She knows what I will dream tonight
because it is the thing I dream every night.
I tell her
of the stars that fell
when we made love in the darkness. First,
across the country,
then closer
and closer
until they fell
beside our feet
and into the river that widened to swallow mercurial balls.
The river water splashed
and the waves and stardust pushed
against my back,
away from you,
but you tightly pressed your head into my chest.
And nothing moved.
We kissed and you passed into my mouth
a single blue bead of jade,
the hardest stone we know,
to carry me into the next world.
Breathless—Colorful
And you will see
that I think too much.
And there are several trees in particular
I cry beneath.
And often times when I cannot sleep
it is because the dark busies my heartbeat
with all the waking colors
we have absorbed
Happiness, I ponder
is waking up every morning
feeling you have been
awoken.
And here the cold rings clearly
through my mind
as you do
At the core of joy
is that blue alertness:
Like the sun echoing into the glacier
breathing blue light back out
through the cracks
imbuing no difference between
cold and heat
Just an ever- expanding sound
That lung of love
(back to top…)Between the rings
Unlike the raccoon
we cannot date ourselves back
by our tails
ringed in quiet smoke
like the spiraling heart
of the bristle cone pine
yet
the conifer murmur
rushes in our ears
rain fall
hums on our lips
sun rise
at the quickening pulse
of that blinding question
are we not but brief flickerings of life?
incident rays
skipped
across climactic cycles
It strikes you
the raccoon emerged
not to drink
up
but to reflect
back
the light raining
from your eyes
There is no need to search
the breath
caught in your throat
for your place in history
Before there were words
there were trees
inception ~ to a fox
And in the sudden sea
of that moment
I was lighthouse
you were ship
I stammer-stepped still
to shine
upon the knoll
of your head islanding above
the waves
then sinking below
reeling you in
unwittingly
as the old stars fell
ochre raining
leaves
follow my gaze instead
somehow instinct navigates us
or casting back out
the reflection
of the eyes
of the fox
amber prow rippling pushing forward
flooding the leaf pile
ocean between the trees
gold tumbling through
the darkness
scattering at my feet
not to wade through
but to tread the autumn
tidal
shivering shards of an over-ripe summer
lost at sea
did you choose me
to shine
or did I choose you
to swim
or did we both choose
to lose our way
in order to find ourselves back
together again?
you may be off course
could I really be
that thirsty spool of light
winding in your drifting
mind
urgent body?
disappearing into the depths
resurfacing with leaping breaths surging
arcing to a docking
just before my feet
the fox anchored my gaze
to the pupils of the few scattered stars
visible
only in silhouette
he turned and fled
leaving me
a silent port
a noiseless knowing
that I had just beckoned
my own arrival
Undertow
Do you ever
wonder
about
the ancient
dance
in your hipbones?
Some wave that
sculpted
across you
the song of the whale
jaw riveted at your sides
hipbone glides
to inward slope of baleen
stomach
with soft shadow hair across
the smooth edging into
tidal step
forward
the whaleroad
memory
rushes back
into me: breathing
outward
gazing up at that dark arctic artifact in the rafters
inward
thoughtful feet pressing upward into the top bunk
recognizing
my tilted core
the shape
dreamfalling into the thought
We must be
fish- out- of -water
dancers
Grandma
I knew her: old and wrinkled woman bent
in front of the sink. I called her halmoni.
It’s strange: I never thought to ask her name,
and when she died, she kept that appellation:
Grandma. Not to boast about my lack
of intimacy, no—Koreans have
all sorts of names, and we’re subsumed in them.
In nineteen eighty three, when dad was sent
to prison, beat until his urine ran
with blood, she gravely called out Kim Eungson—
a name I will not use until he’s dead—
without a trace of fear. As if the brute
devices of simple thugs could make her flinch.
She asked him for the underwear he had
thrown away to spare her pain, and washed
it white again by hand. It’s what she knew,
the simple rhythms, water and prayer, things
no pain could take from her. She’d scrub alone
until the sink was filled with suds and calmly
wash the dishes clean, each soapy dream
descending, swirling down the gaping drain,
to grace the demon in the pipes with food
for thought. If she had dreams I did not know them
but I knew the sound of water, the rush
of steam, the scent of soap, the dishes clinking.
One day these things were gone.
My picture, tucked
inside her worn-down Bible, kept her company.
Her face was formed into a frown in that
casket. I couldn’t help remembering
that day my mom sighed and told her not
to work. We had machines to wash the plates.