Poems by Tien Tran
Updated 11/2/21
Warwick, RI
To Richard, dear and constant friend.
- Nocturne II
- Dane Co.
- Nocturne I
- Haikus & Whatnot
- Two Gardens
- [untitled]
- On Dayton I Hear
- Spring Conference
- Autumnal Cumuli
- Nothing to Write Home About
- Room Without Posters
- Part Sheer Bumpkinism
- Power Comes to the Countryside
- Comedy in Juxtaposition
- Fast Slow Fast
- Recondite Harmony
- Decade of Exploration
- Under a Big Hat
- Yellow Sonnet
- Sudden Epistolary Impulse
- For My Imaginary Pet Chihuahua Who Died of a Heart Attack
- The Cistern
- Snakes & Yearbook - 5 Poems
- Early Century
- Paul, Julian, Apostates
- Retreat
- Triumph of the Minimalists
- Canadian Quarters
- Disembodied Poetics
- A Cool Interior
- Mimosa
- New Year's in Bao Loc
- Heart Like a Hanging Lute
- In Winter
- Turtles
- The Pequod in Moonlight
- Midfall
- Migration
- Mt. Pinatubo
- Eclipse
- Scene in a Drought
- Two Seasons
- Signs
- 2 Political Songs
- The Old Scholar: A Lament
- The Palm in Valdosta
- Conversation
- Cave of the 40 Thieves
- Convalescent
Nocturne II
For us, it’s nature
invents images:
we were playing tennis,
9, 10 at night, when it was
finally getting cool;
all summer, night developed
darker than I ever remembered,
wild forehands
clearing the net, sending K. and me scrambling
into fissures of weeds and
tall grass, fireflies, dusky
street and apartment lights.
In no man’s land,
out of the light,
a brown bat dropped
onto the tennis court—
dead before we arrived—
but not a grisly death, or fearsome or ugly thing,
the lustrous brown fur coat,
small as girl’s hand, lay folded
in the grainy light.
We’d play in increasing wind
till it seemed midnight
and insects had locked
the city block down in silence.
For us it’s
imagining nature
overwhelms and kills.
Outside our building a cabbage
butterfly (white) floated down
onto the red, wet mulch bank—
floated down bearing down
a still companion; now hovering over the torn
and broken wing of its still
unresponding partner
beneath shedding azaleas.
Watch our neighbor pace
the ashen square of her small kitchen,
in the interval of light, sleepless window,
gray hair combusting, relic, souvenir
of the Pacific.
There are storms unfathomable that last
longer than the storm of the mind.
Late night, fireflies go up, their blinking
ending up in the tall, dark head of magnolia.
Dane Co.
In the spirit of Dane Arts posters, an annual series.
Carelessly, the future holds
and interprets the past, counts out pardon.
They no longer speak with so much eloquence
of their own, changing feelings, which are
to us innocent, as nearly incomprehensible.
In wet, late day, the bright grass grows,
with clover and dandelion extinguished
the field-and-margin obtains—
summer’s rooted-tall expansion.
To the eye, back of the reflection,
end of day’s traffic increases and slows.
Who comforts them, our ancestors
out dripping in the cold?
Headlights blink, the sky shivers
in sunken puddles where a new building goes.
Nocturne I
Megan, what was it you said
about the futility of music?
Season after season
the same, heroic programs
of masterworks produced
to ever-better engineering,
no-less-than-perfect playing.
Did you mean that
performance or recording, none
rivals music heard for the first time,
emotions discovered
for the first time, in childhood?
Since it was pain
that I heard in your voice
and that I saw in your eyes.
Did you mean that
music returns you to the same place
full of strange, new feelings, elations,
misgivings, and no clue
what to do about it?
I came trailing in hurt,
anger, confusion,
and in her keyboard Megan declined
to answer the accusation.
Vaunted intervals, a melody,
from our neighbors sprang in,
held that moment apart,
where we waited for silence
to end,
as if permanently.
Haikus & Whatnot
On roof, windows and
wind-shields, fall rain has washed
late summer’s quantity of birdshit away.
Deep-sky April morning,
clangor of things going
down the rubbish chute.
In the grass, the glow, almost gone.
In the flare of another match,
the mosquito candle.
Cold summer morn:
cold, seething rain
unlike any crying.
Wind & moonlight—
I smell as well as see
the water treatment plant.
J.A. still writes so much.
I hope to see
the Collected.
[The newspaper article’s grown too long,
encrusted with stale conventions that prevent the news from being heard.]
And look! from the concretest things, my verse has grown abstract.
The script was in turmoil,
all desperate confusion,
day before we shot the pilot.
I swear not to troll, or to troll but lightly.
You’re a troll! You’re a troll since the beginning of time!
One line
break
haiku.
In the middle,
the middle of the afternoon,
a bird falling, bird-document.
To the ladies who commiserated:
The same wind that whirled the leaves whirled me
in a cloud of dust—is the motion that joy compels;
it was an accident this morning that I was crying.
My allergies in spring,
Your allergies in the fall—
In winter, I remember summer.
Two Gardens
1. Moss Garden
Sunlight adjusts their faces, the gnomes
are glad to see me, on the way
to someone, as it gets ready to storm.
I go to smoke, outside the eave
a candle goes among giant, hovering insects.
No one panics when the lights go on.
For news that was printed out, every morning
in suit, I’d wake to our sleepy mountain valley
seething still tobacco smoke. City routine,
village love, diaried the mind to an effect.
Here men and women pursue
the growing margin of a good life,
seasonal rain mars seminal green,
Hozu River calls to stations
in progress of mist, night . . .
2. Garden by the Sea
Voices mingled in wild perfume
echo bleach through balconies
rustling sprawled, tall bougainvillea.
Thoughts that would turn into the sea
or pry concrete-heavy surf for hard limpets’
sole practice of holding on . . .
found the brisk, native welcome
where ongoing calls join sections of the road.
The first day the sea stepped into our arms,
left broken coastal chains and darkened
hillside; appeared again in the middle
of the street, flooding petals and footprints on dusty cement . . .
[untitled]
The team playing this evening barely remember
the coffee groves, houses evacuating town
for the hill’s hold in the long harvest season;
while one breaks open a toe kicking the goal,
a level stump on the shallow field of grass.
Patient, nearby they’re hauling in now
ripe berries among crates of hard, green fists.
The smell follows them into a growing sleep—
semblance and excess star, through windy days
a steady light turning mounds of mangos.
Long decided, the game ends, when day ends,
too long for the sidelined. A pale ribbon of dust
leaves the hill beneath night’s blooming meadow.
On Dayton I Hear
News of the neighborhood
when tall social clouds out of
nowhere appeared/cleared up the horizon.
Pecan and oak stumps gone, Duplex
no longer seems so much like a dilapidated wreck;
stepping-stones are growing greener.
There was housing among citizens,
townies (transplants, epiphytes) night
lightning bore down the disintegrating
old oak—no more haunted, shady spot.
Leaf prints faded on sunny sidewalks.
Divided abruptly high, a gull spun—
yanked profile—into the creek, crayfish flew
beyond the paddle’s sight . . .
I can’t see their faces, who drink turning
from the stream: bright corridor siphons
from pre-peak traffic discord anthem.
I’ve seen a still turbulence ignite
immovable eyes in the dark,
for whom futurity exacts
an expression; when was extinct
the [img]clusive fire.*
Work of a vine spilling in sunlight. . .
The complex dreams decay,
furniture constitute the courtyard
while the turns illuminate
of a stubborn, common biography.
Or lava flows, is wax melts.
Notes
*This is a graphic or visual effect: the syllables in and ex, superimposed, are a blot or smudge, as of a raindrop or tear falling on the page.
Spring Conference
1.
Distracted while shown
the photonics lab I
formed mental notes
of my own confusion, of which
none here survives,
though my dream
of process
remains intact. Watching
spruce arms from a tree-
high porch, I wave
to my neighbor waving
to someone off-road, is late and hurries
to her car. A cardinal,
fall’s leaving, gusts down,
the matte hen flies up a branch.
Spring come, I grow somber,
indifferent.
I point perpendicular ways,
to morning, to evening’s
different stars;
songs that leave me, winds;
days find where the sun al-
ready rises, I walk uphill
wearing sunglasses.
2.
Leaf piles gone
birds are gent ly blown
up hill one
by one
Autumnal Cumuli
I said listen, we’re on
the same side we’re batting
for the same team here.
The way some people live,
love flowers at the card table.
Makes me horribly sad
I can bash your skull in.
The mother vole discerning
the foxes’ nearing
footsteps carries her litter underground;
the bees triumph routing
the lean black bear;
mindful of harsh winter nights to come the owl
hoots wakefully...
Clear days see to infinity.
Absolve us.
Somewhere our guide pauses
in a posture of attentive
listening divested of all music.
Coming to wash myself
presently I found the pool’s edge
too responsive to disturb.
We’re unfeeling, callous,
cut off and bumping into walls.
The lake darkens, trees bow.
Patrons swarm the lily of the fountain.
Your party’s got lost in the corridor,
coming back to the apartment, studio,
thinking to change your mind about what?
Memories dead pixel in intense sunlight.
A bowl of salad at the end of the block.
Nothing to Write Home About
I found myself smoking, that long interval I lived
near a railway and caught the train mid-puff
(the Cable vans were more frequent, staying the world
on misty gears).
So things seemed to persist, the flashy year,
the glowing tip of one cigarette.
Dogs picked away a neighbor’s game hen brood,
the more strays came the quieter it got.
I moved somewhere cold, worked in a warehouse
welding garden equipment. At night, spillover wind,
no sound; in lamps’ light old songs insinuated.
The cousin who came to our house after ’85
slept on the floor with his clothes under one arm.
Tell her it was the same, last winter,
my neighbor’s wife. (Over the parking lot,
where light ends the fat snow begins.)
One walks onto snow wearing new fleece,
clobbers a storm into featherfall.
Room Without Posters
The road close to noon wavered before us—
dwindled quickly, was gone in the hills’ shade.
July, cicadas’ season—we filed beneath
stark walls of droning and listless trees.
Asaki brought a cicada wrapped in a young
mulberry leaf—frail sheath for perfect-
iron wings, that to hold it I spun on my feet.
It flew, swerved right, but the farm tipped.
At Ingolstadt I stopped to listen to the forest’s
broken edge falter, haphazardly again start—
antiphonal voices in descent and ascent—
I calmed myself at night thinking of home.
Huddled together, the trees turn into October—
Old men and old women, their own
fondness for secrets corrodes their knowledge.
The foxy gild flakes and falls from them.
One’s appetite grows suggestible here—
Teach me to hate, in white winter, the abstract and
sly negative, I cannot touch that circle again.
A fire of dead leaves bursts on the grill.
Notes
Ingolstadt is where Victor Frankenstein goes to university, who grew up devouring medieval books of alchemy in his father’s library.
Part Sheer Bumpkinism
Tipsy, the friend's friend was telling me
his story, appropriate to memory
of a neighbor of mine, weekend
hunting with a marble slingshot.
That afternoon he ran into people:
said he foresaw their cheeriness, local
tourists, who, the way crowded, easily,
but resolutely, were turning back.
And as lonely before, the bike trail began
to contradict (in the woods lying on moss-
rock, blood trickling from your ears, staring
at the sky, you know you’ve just seen cars).
He was caught, talking, smiling like
fresh damp pine straw, by a bullet shot
from the burnished mahogany slingshot,
in a powdery stretch of the woods.
Violence accumulated in sparse snow,
twitchy red and green traffic lights.
The moment he turned, a patch of snow
fell behind the muddy cliff—
a giant owl he couldn’t have heard.
I climbed down ledge and fire-escape
going to friends and neighbors of mine,
to put the jaunty man to sleep.
Power Comes to the Countryside
They feel the wind on their puissant fingertips, but where they point
the wind’s already gone; they run
in lengthening ellipses, up and down the street.
Women, your faces are yellow as kerosene lamps, tonight
your gaunt shadows streak...
(Fathers, your smoke obscures doorways.)
Call down the banner flouting curfew darkness.
Moths contrive ways down an alley in rungs of light.
Sometimes she remembers the censer’s gush on the hearse-
wide dirt road whiter than early fog, Aves alone before dawn;
and as honeysuckle scent appears along the hibiscus hedge, or rain’s
wetness during an hour closely insists, clods thump
the outside door abandoning speed.
They make it where wind fails integers of space.
(The insect flame, hurtled so far, ignites empty streets,
sinks wide and escapes.)
To weigh beyond walls assembled, jointed, at a touch—
the suicide’s flowers cannot vaunt over this.
Comedy in Juxtaposition
1.
When the rooster crows, it’ll be incredibly early.
A lamp tears a curtain running far into the night,
the young secretary’s face advances near
the empty woods. Every place folds into doors,
and darkness caught many on their feet.
2.
We’ll build the pylon slowly,
walk the plaza before returning to each note.
We’ll know how far the sound carries...
We need an assessment of real abilities.
3.
The committee doesn’t know how this convention will end,
if Love will gore and transfigure in the same instant,
nothing opaque as the river where neighbors drown.
The dog floating by on debris is someone else’s dog.
“Either your fault or mine, but Old Sky ordains it.”
4.
Comrade N. isn’t going to admit that Marxism was only
a boat to cross the river, but it having grown late,
though in the past often mistaken, he must see through
to his own failure, he must realize that the struggle continues,
has in pockets, whether or not he complies again.
5.
Between resting and staying...
between the purely formal and the
purely mimetic, betrayal traffics fluently.
We won’t trade back our poverty.
Fast Slow Fast
1.
Where does it come from, this rush, euphoria, elation?
South Gorge thunders down slamming the shale
cliffs green-muddy waterflanks erupt foam
suds froth spume spray. A porous sizzle
if you listen, infolding sibilance, gladly mocks...
Impossible, not to want to throw your voice, claim a part
of this energy. I hurry from the bridge
keeping the path, my body, straight while vision
tips me down sideways; South Gorge
courses mightily, leaps far over or easily
subsumes a rock, past retreating columns
of ice, vertiginous hemlock and pines,
countless shades of green, shaggy grass I could
grab if I fell... A million bells topple
in the gorge, labyrinths of water echoing.
It’s gone, echoless the year and winter...
2.
Wash it off, a day remembered; I stand barefoot
always, in one place shifting
always while day erupts, swirls my arms,
brings my hands all around me. My body
is water, cool to the fleeting, ever-fleeting touch,
my hair of white watercoils drops to my feet.
I am Achelous, head above water, water carries me.
I am Achelous watch out below, it’s raining!
I go outside to listen to South Gorge resonant,
unmistakable in the absence of wind
and night moving, look that way as if to see
moonlight churn beneath the pines.
On the grass bank yesterday while peeing
my housemate discovered a family of graves.
Air laps the wetness of my body, thin
libation for nearly forgotten names.
3.
South Gorge everyday increases in noise:
the cool of dissolving mist; a canyon’s absence you feel
walking at your side; the way water
fans out, streams of light flying out disappearing,
endlessly renewed; moments of clarity...
Let’s keep moving, as spring currents move,
motion outstripping imagination.
But such water (such force!) doesn’t move even
the shadow of a tree across the gorge.
Beside the path that winds slowly all the way
down among ferns and trees the fall’s
length boils into presence.
The shadow trembles in place, here and
there and farther down the white breaking over
rocks stays trembling in place—
You’re faster, then, than water,
Recondite Harmony
. . . also to Meo, who crossed the floor
that cool August night. What urgency,
her famished, burning eyes, the new thinness of her body.
The place brightened with alarm.
Where are you going, Meo, irregular calico?
Your litter is blind, your shape still discernible
on the pallet, where you lay among them.
She went and we
(who’d come to remember) couldn’t follow.
Notes
“Recondita armonia” is an aria from Puccini’s Tosca.
Decade of Exploration
End of the dive black gliding wings
scattered to reveal a blue, blue sea: fish
more colorful than flowers, pastel anemone,
carnelian
coral like tangled blood
divers harvest
to grind, mold into statuettes, earrings.
On neighborhood housetops TV antennas
claw at evening’s approach.
They are the skeletons of fish.
Where is the sea?
Where is the sea?
Under a Big Hat
Five umbrellas at the end of the world—
five blue umbrellas, angled in sun’s debris.
Roar of the Pacific slamming its brakes.
Benneth Dhindsa, one travels so far, squanders so much
for the poverty of the ocean.
He sits sipping piña colada on a blue-and-green wave,
caricature of the sea, mindless of my shrill entreaties.
Where the sun divides
the sea, the sea tosses onto waves heads, limbs, bodies...
They strive out of the water uncertain how to step.
When B. bends to answer the sun
has made a huge, orangey mess of going down.
The night, though attenuated, mended us.
We drank some more, listened for as long as we could,
And fell separately to sleep.
Months from now the ocean’s not what I think of.
Yellow Sonnet
I lost my glass of orange juice today,
this morning: took a sip, turned to Buddy,
next thing I was outside again, then on the porch.
(It was on the bookcase, behind a photo print.)
Crouching, I saw at the corner of my eye
plump lemons, out to ripen under the lamp,
only the sun come peering in the open window.
A kitchen glove beside the sink, a car whizzing by.
And like an ant, suddenly indoors, I went
place to place, amazed, restless, tireless.
I heard everywhere silence about to burst.
All morning I hunted for my glass of orange juice—
long exercise that, coming back afterwards,
I drank with a burning, quenchable thirst.
Sudden Epistolary Impulse
Le Phuong, I heard you twisted your ankle
hiking with the old gang last week; the pain’s gone
I hope, though for a time I’ll have to give up
picturing you on the steep path
behind the house, dress in clear sunlight,
blue demi-garçon hair like spring’s trophy
over all the garden plants.
Last time you visited, I remarked that,
eyes closed, one could almost imagine
standing in the middle of the forest;
so leafy the apartment had grown
under your mild, durable influence.
The hue remained for a time
on my rosy, rosy cheeks.
It’s simple, always—you’re too much
of this world. Please come,
whenever you feel like.
The air plant distills indifference;
we’ll watch the red or white flowers
bloom, talk about what infrequently
assails us, to lessen our stutter.
For My Imaginary Pet Chihuahua Who Died of a Heart Attack
That peeling house with those
floor-to-ceiling windows, came fall again
and again, we wandered
in a Technicolor show of leaves.
When Andy went
with all September, recalling old
commotion of feet,
it was as though a hundred of us had left.
Things got ghastly, Korolai cried
and cried, said, “Like a fucking movie!”
Which stupefied me, but I
tried best I could to soothe
that masculine, weatherlike girl.
You see where this is going.
Folks back home started calling,
hysterical and for no good reason
said why not this, why not…
“But for god’s sake.”
Just like that,
we killed the phone, I started putting on
Bruckner like crazy, surround
sound still new I couldn’t stop.
It went so well you know, with all the leaves
and stuff, I’d conduct empty chairs
while Korolai she’d just sit there
full of sadness, a foreign beauty.
Till early morn I was up heating up
storebrand can of tuna or jamming
down the trash Korolai came home
shivering, pulled out from her canvas bag
a Ouija board, Chopin on an obscure
defunct label: lugubrious
handful of polonaises that cheered her
the moment Sehr feierlich
und sehr langsam
stopped.
Before we knew, winter came
real picturesque like winter in Soviet
magazines we used for book covers:
the Ouija board brought no visitors
to the house. Life bettering, I filled out
a bit.
But Korolai I should’ve known
grew restless with harder, more regular snow,
at some point, discolored eyes brimming,
unleashed devastation:
“Don’t you know, I don’t even know
what’s real or not real anymore!”
What’s one to say?
Careful,
I touched her she said mind
counterfeits, something, counterfeits,
that too: it’s what everyone knows.
We tried silence, turning off the heat,
chucked out her easel, but not
anything helped, our mind could be
anything, and we... were cold and bored.
Therefore gallant I went to bring it back,
the girl seeing at least fleetingly smiled.
Still winter, but nasty rain
and snow, Toto, come in rags
tattered, just plain messy.
We’ll have to be drastic
in the spring Korolai agrees,
go back, go out west, go separate ways, something.
Last night I said, finally,
“What does it matter, in the nuthouse,
whether you’re happy or unhappy?”
With a feral cry
she threw her paint tray at me.
“The drama queen!” I said bitterly.
Remember the blooming forest,
bands of laughing squirrels, socialist
poetry competitions, on a riverbank
flowers so lush you could
smear their paint.
I write for no one, Toto, it’s true.
The Cistern
The bitter melons, ripened, dangled
like flames above the water—
fetid black water where
looking in we saw
only clouds, leaf droves drifting
like clouds. Slowly Vien
lowered his cupped hands, came up
with two gleaming
murk pools—the fish
was gone that before had been
broken, wouldn’t move
or eat, to Vien’s biting grief.
In the house, Thu lived alone
With an aunt, her mother—
turning, I saw her figure in a window
draw sharply away.
The lone Alsatian somewhere
nearby started barking—in a pack
we leapt over the fence
and didn’t look back.
It was months later,
mid rain season, one evening
Vien appeared, sopping wet, holding in
roiled water
in a jar a new prize, Siamese
two, three times big,
said he alone had gone back
into the cistern.
Though we doubted, that the fish was
no fish was clear—its blue too
dark to be blue, bullet-
head fierce as stormy night,
with more than menace, shiny.
The cistern had fed,
had changed it; it won now
every fight—opponents doubtfully
struck, then would flee,
or were dragged down silently
in a boiling cloud.
Who knows how long
Vien’s happiness endured,
but we saw how
bright scales began to cloud,
till in the end each stared
from the jar
like a solid eye, the eyes
themselves swollen, sluggish.
This time Vien flung it
into a storm in the night.
Not long afterward, Ms. Hoa
fell ill and died;
Thu married, went secretly
away—abroad, some said.
When the trellis, grown
heavy, or grown weak, crashed
into that water, the hanging fire was
put out at last, sank far below.
In the cistern the seasons grew
impatient, a fissure must’ve
opened, for the water
began a long, eventful retreat—
planks and
vines poked out, breaking
the surface sky.
The Alsatian alone remained
unaccounted for, when I left—
few of us stayed
before that wreckage was brought
fully to light.
Snakes & Yearbook
1. February
The funeral over, three days, the merchant’s three-
story house (red clay shingles, polished
walls) breeds shadows—100-kilo
burlap sacks like bloated sentinels.
A crowd fill the windy courtyard,
turning at the door—to stare into the unlit
house and announce the omen of snakes
that wield and toss, paired bodies, in tight inflection.
2. The Humid Season
Double, still composed, the giant red
centipede coils in roiled clear liquor.
It’s raining tonight, for friends, dear ones lost
in the compass; for strange, familiar dead;
families fighting hopeless war
in the NEZ.
Fall rain falls steady, on mute
procession of ghosts; no hands can guide,
or voice or light will lure them in.
On folded arms Lieutenant
starts to dream again.
Wild morning on the mountain front,
soldiers in the mist and cold look homeward
through ash plumes of night insects.
In sliding mud, boots curve and flex—
and the writhing viper hisses
in the ground, disconnected, surprised.
Between dawn-glazed hills, shots broke
night’s silence and darkness, reeling still
with the vapor of snakes. (Awake:
a cabin fast brightening
before the old flame goes out.)
3. Interlude
Where there’s snake, there’s no sorrow.
On the barbed-wire fence one hung
small as my finger, head mangled,
green, gleaming as jade; I walked up
with a stick, and flicked the snake
onto the ground, to see it yellow with dust.
A branch above rustled—
I jumped clear of the fence and ran.
Smoke rose from my neighbor’s chimneys,
my enemies were coming (I heard
their running) fast round the bend.
Where there’s snake, there’s no sorrow.
4. A Storm
Each time to mend the alley new
gravel spreads, their house sinks
a little; lighter, storms that drive
flood through both side doors.
Exhausted, Vui leans onto her mother:
The women stand to watch
muddy water creep up around them.
What year is this? How many
since the ground began to rise?
Each flash and crack of lightning,
a corner of the house flares up:
cabinets, table and chairs,
bags of grain slumped in the chairs,
the crowded family shrine—
flares up, water among faces
taken long ago.
In the fever, they forget, or can’t see
a watersnake that washes in,
has gathered itself against the wall.
On its part the storm-raised
snake’s not watching them.
5. A Final Mural
Forget poverty, injustice, and war.
The afternoons are his; no guests,
no sounds intrude, except nearby cicadas,
indistinct voices, electricity of clouds
in the air.
(The clouds have begun to appear
each afternoon on the horizon, dragging
shadows over forests, dusty hills and towns.)
He pauses, touching the tip of charcoal,
dry cool, to his dry lips,
the muralist and sign painter—
runaway-refugee.
(Memorable word, “refugee.”
Neighbors will find his clothes, worn
pairs of Lao sandals, bright colors once,
his books, notebooks, all, in a jumbled pile;
mention his name and say he’s flitted away—
unknown summer a streak of light
flitted away, and this was his once,
formerly, adequate house—iridescent,
unwinding coil binding his life.)
Spirit, refugee, he reenters outlined scales
in the dragon’s breast exposing the yellowed paper
of the wall. The archaic serpent comes round
with eyes shining, out searching cloud, wiry arms
in cloud let go, about to catch.
Early Century
From Apollo’s temple Hardhat emerges.
Shielding his eyes, he surveys the lines of cars,
myriad tiny suns in windshields captured, and not,
for their endless repetition, less blinding;
and takes a few steps as if he’s seen something,
some important work for which he’s been summoned.
But there’s nothing, that I can see, and he stops,
remains for a long time motionless, stranded
on the hot concrete, before the campus woods
where April mounts numerous shades of green.
In this fresh production he can’t see me,
steps forward, steps back again, reluctantly.
The rooftop portico, the shiny cars, the Doric
colonnade, make such an eclectic scene
that I’m not surprised he hasn’t found his way.
Impossible now to heroize this man,
worker out of work; midday sunlight whitens
tanned muscular arms like delicate debris.
A city’s or a god’s servant, he stands quite still—
so still, for so long, that I look down the street
for lights and sirens that might’ve arrived.
But the same quiet rules above, as all below,
and wary of brinkmanship, I choose defeat;
walk out and presently return to find him gone,
as I knew he’d be gone; even less than that,
he was never there: what token could I have?
By evening all the cars have cleared; oil stains
dissolve in atmosphere that thickens and chills.
The woods nearby sends out ardent new voices,
bird voices—where I lie down mild spring wind
scatters distance-noisy inanities.
Paul, Julian, Apostates
1.
Insistent the music inside my head and calm, very calm,
I asked myself, “Is there poetry in this?”
The boy next to me took off his glowing shirt,
more came spinning in, the door behind them, a whir.
Afterwards I stood against a wall in the alley
looking up for the ten thousandth night at the sky—
and looking, I thought nothing—nothing then.
Lucid, dreadful, drove home near start of dawn.
Trucks with fresh cargoes were arriving at gas stations,
grocery stores, or like their drivers bright-eyed,
speeding through the city. It would’ve been easy,
but so many things like comets flew overhead, too fast
for their image, a comet’s shedding tail, to adhere to them.
2.
On schedule we arrived, found brooms to sweep
cobweb from the ceiling and walls. We envied
first, most, those gone before us; then raged
that they had left behind such squalor—broken
basket where maggots crawled milky white, news-
paper, tissue paper everywhere, all kinds of garbage.
In one corner, the stripped pages of a photo album.
The smell, too, of waste, filth and past filth.
When something like shame found us, we filed out,
stood in a line to watch the sun aim its rays.
We would see the onslaught of that low-lying sun.
It was April—a neighbor out on the road said
was a good time to arrive, during the dry season.
3.
“Rain’s different there, do you remember?”
Going to Mass, I lost my umbrella to rain and wind;
like Noah’s flood, it poured for weeks on end.
At the back door, sis’ voice was like an incantation.
Lil’ brother, still eating, made to join us.
I couldn’t remember the rain, or what was said
at meal or otherwise about the rain;
I couldn’t tell them the poem I wanted to write—
mild afternoon and warm, all of us sat together.
At school the oaks’ veins swelled guiding night
beyond a phosphorescent, early-deserted quad.
I fell asleep watching light through window blinds
drape over every object the same, fluid pattern.
4.
There was a trough, a vale quite near our barracks
all summer buzzed with flies mulberries’
oversweet fragrance spawned numerous and wild.
Vendors sold berries from bicycles on the road,
but knowing the fly swarms, we disdained their bargain.
Till X offered us a ripened bunch from his hands,
led us begging through the neighborhood;
said years back Pinatubo on the horizon erupted,
for endless weeks ash drained the camp of all color.
Too bad we weren’t there, it was like... like snow!
X wiped his hands, stained purple, against a post,
then produced from his pocket an indistinct picture.
That night some of us, awake, felt the ground move.
5.
For long the guilt had left us, when a day arrived
so bright, so high, our metaphors fell beneath
vividness of the trees. You’re useful yet,
I said to myself—sell poems from painted booths,
roadside and on highways, memorial poetry bouquets;
solicit generous patrons going door to door;
else take paper and instrument to the fields.
But which of these was ever, which going to be,
a viable option! I walked the campus taking the longest,
remotest ways, dreaming as I walked the trail
of things clear caught up, surrounding me like a globe.
But your mind could not be so beguiled, and I
kept walking, sun’s wafer stubborn in my eyes.
6.
X began a story, leaving it broken at nowhere.
If we sat still we could feel sweat beads trailing down
our backs, our sides and our arms like tongues.
Night before, it had happened again, the alert and omen—
among recollections of home—of a larger, vaguer past—
the one or two, quick, shifts, slight like something inside.
then, vast in the guts, terror of anticipation.
Whatever had revealed itself was content or resting now;
“Earthquakes are common,” people long in the camp said.
“Don’t forget, we’re on the ocean on an island!”
Mulberries drooped, oppressed to silence in sunlight,
the flies swallowed up in light’s commotion.
We tested the earth and found it firm under our feet.
7.
Returning from noon I came alone to the bridge,
below me glinting tracks ran in another direction,
headlong disappearing in a country of pines—
the spirit world that way beckoned, with pliant verdure,
summer peace of having only to look and be pleased.
But on the other side, in recesses, patches of snow
still glimmered; April beginning some green had broken out,
pungent accents in winter’s last, untidy variation.
For a time I stood against the high stone parapet
thinking of the cold and warmth in sunlight mingled.
The wind rasped, a sound of feet in the leaves.
Against the huge tapestry of the campus woods,
there I ended the long argument with myself.
8.
The clouds arrived, we went to give Mary devotion,
in another zone, at a grove by one end of the camp.
Mary was nearly lost in heaped flowers and incense.
Afterwards pilgrims went to a fast-flowing creek nearby;
some waded in till water began to tug, some swam
to large shiny rocks, or to the other, reedy shore.
Jubilant the day waned, still wet we filed onto the road.
When we saw our barracks one of us suddenly ran ahead,
and with a wild halloo cut into the thicketed valley;
mulberries, half rotten, strewed our unlikely path,
odor in the hum of flies like soured wine.
Waiting at home, X grimaced when we emerged
stooping on the road to remove our stained sandals.
Postlude
The platform curved from the bar like a lens, level
with titanic contraptions of music and light.
The floor throbbed with rhythmic detonation.
A disco ball threw galaxies against the wall on one side,
the stars retreating fast, too fast for lasting illusion.
With a bundle of glow sticks one beside me appeared,
held out his illumined hands above the packed dance floor.
At a whistle the green and yellow sticks
like sparks scattered—instantly they took shape,
around heads, around necks and arms, and took,
too, to undulant motion. The lights went out,
unaware the sounds continued, uncrowded, making way
as to the quaking, sweltering deeps of an ocean.
Retreat
Light on the trees flashes
a scene too minute for words.
The reader gathers a book
close to him, he wants nothing
more than the illusion of words
lifting off the page in calm,
calm-lit afternoon.
New as travel makes us,
in the median cut grass, withered,
new, coasts like sea foam
arriving at the feet of men
in numbered jumpsuits
dragging outsize nylon sacks—
slowly buoyant, unbelievable industry.
Sure of direction, the bus speeds;
the mind, freed to wander, chooses
repose. Windows are lowered, voices
cease as wind roars through—
face cooled, I too close
my eyes, hold in unseeing brightness
when guest sleep comes, the image
of a tree on the high bank
before countless glistening others
clasping to itself its immense shadow.
The reader becomes the book then,
in dream’s real, forgotten countries?
Drawn out again and through
visions
hastily revised, abstracted where
no book or memory survives...
wake up to find land, changed;
no more mirrored cliffs of green
guiding us, pine’s cloudy swath
among particular ash, beech, sycamore,
or jewel, rusted magnolia.
Between jutting masts of trees
Spanish moss like rotten, tattered
sails catch darkness, beginning.
The town abandoned we enter
slowing, slowing yet beneath
huge, twisted tree limbs and sleeves
of moss that in a breeze continually reach
our windows. Live oaks spill
famous shadow; the book held shut
on one finger again opens, but there
refulgent evening through near trees flickers,
the sun, a fitful, dying bulb.
We stop at the first lit road.
Soon we’ve stopped. Book caws from a branch
and darkness increased, on the ground
wakeful travelers, on bent shoulders
discover the way.
Triumph of the Minimalists
Now I take exception to the notion that J. Samoth
(who, judging by this disc, is still going strong)
writes unimportant music. True, you won’t find here
the fragmentation and angular juxtaposition of
orchestral textures, the manipulation of irregular rhyth-
mic/motivic cells, the casual tonal anarchy that’ve
been for some time like something approaching
a recognizable, for better or worse, contemporary idiom;
but the intelligent Samoth isn’t reactionary,
nor more devastating still, simply old-fashioned.
Take the dramatic opening, for example: how stylish,
competent and truly inspired, the thing unfolds
joyously with Takahashi and the rising Jonesboro
Philharmonic. If the appearance of the enigmatic
main theme on trumpets amidst whirling strings does not move,
the faults lies, surely, with a catatonic listener.
To describe can only be tedious;
suffice it to say that it coasts
from strength ever to more strength,
inner movements star-dense with ideas
to a finale impressive in scale, logic, and decibels.
There’s nothing out there quite like this, or more
enjoyable, whose full expression demands minimum
more than benign attention and clean ears.
The polemical Samoth, incidentally, hasn’t mellowed
one bit; though one might well wonder
if liner notes aren’t for the already-converted.
Better is Minoa’s crystal, spatially well-organized sound,
justifying private listening as a complete musical experience.
As it happens, the composer was in town
for the work’s exciting premier this past February
in our snow-braced St. Mary packed with devout and
hardy listeners. I met with him afterwards in the lobby,
and though tired he was gracious, parrying my praises.
“If only you weren’t retiring!” he said. Like his symphonies,
the person Samoth evinces complete, unassailable integrity.
(A solid three oboes, then, and a request
for more from these same forces.)
Canadian Quarters
A plummeting cry had interrupted the scene—
our coworkers rushed in, launched us outside
where on the lawn the goose lay dead.
One touched it with her shoe-tip.
It lay head twisted, smiling to one side.
While we wondered, our boss,
competent woman, took it in;
asked us sideways why
we were curious, the tables weren’t all
in place, the guests being near.
We moved again among the dim-lit tables—
Laughter, silverware, drunk-
loud voices; the wedding seemed one we’d attended
long ago.
The yew bank, the hills
went out, the party floated out into space.
We dreamed of home during the cleanup,
of a weekend morning walking along a pond
in the park, or in the museum’s wide polished halls.
Geese will thrill us
as no wedding will stir us
in upcoming social experiments.
Disembodied Poetics
Sneeze
Half-blind stumble into the kitchen submit
wet gleaming hands to the moons
Cough
Their voices cross the table
and become prayers
Fart
Stairwell objects
A Cool Interior
Eons ago, on an island
in the middle of the Pacific
a disciplined, young, successful artist
set out to build earth’s paradise.
Today in that famous resort town you’ll find
a sense of order informs the least things:
street and shop signs of the same design—
clean, white lettering on blue background;
immaculately groomed streets that are
seldom wider than one lane; cabins, buildings—
gates, doors, fences—all crisply uniform,
understated, undersize and plain—
through lush tropical vegetation a sprawling fugue
or theme and variations in dark brown, white, blue and green.
The painter in pink and white and blue and green
Hawaii shirt relates all, while his long brush
covers the paint tray, joining washes of color
for the blooming landscape: a hotel with flowers,
bent palms, bright green, open shutters—gradually
coating once-bright squares of pigment
the same greenish, muddy color.
Laying out the island vista is easy:
one slender, vertical stroke—
figure walking in bright distance,
in distance-obliterating mist and sun;
a splash of clear water, without too much,
undue, consideration—clouds,
whose chancy abundance
pleases the hungering eye. Oh shoots!
he cries, and reverses the drip, the joy
of simply painting is pardon, second chance;
is never having to try too hard.
The a/c hums, a string of water beads
shivers underside the windowsill.
In the window heatwaves sink the near world,
a yellow butterfly heroically swims up.
You rise wonder-refreshed, determined
to be free of all illusions, false discipline,
saying, “What illusions? that happiness is difficult?
that youth ever stands corrected?”
The door opens to bearable extreme heat
moments later, holding to the frame,
an eager artist spies on the quiescent,
running neighborhood.
On that revealed island brave
visitors veer off the sun.
Mimosa
The road at noon in a dust-storm—
his whole life he’s known mimosa.
“The wind! let me down!” he said, “Mother!”
Leaves were clamped shut like eyes,
the boy ran along jagged moving shadow,
mimosas before him on the ground.
It’s a word’s seduction foregrounds
one day meanings are shot, instant brainstorm.
What’s left glimmering, there in shadow—
that long-ago, sun-gilded mimosa?
Beyond golden flecks crossing the eyes
you want the clear face of your mother.
He went to see his sleeping mother,
then stood outside watching the ground,
where shining pools lured his eyes.
She must’ve stayed up in last night’s storm
that, foretold, gently shocked, like the mimosa
shivering in his small, bent shadow.
He worked outside till the shadow
on the mowed lawn recalled him to his mother.
She spoke softly when he came in, “Mimosa,”
he heard as he knelt on the ground.
The glimmer of trees falling in a storm
fell across the tender gaze of her eyes.
What’s misery when there are no other eyes
and by yourself you can be a shadow?
All that you know and can’t know storm
the twilight of a room at the sound, mother.
In the tropics entire forest grounds
are overgrown, destroyed by mimosa.
Imagine walking in that jungle mimosa,
darkness everywhere pooled like eyes,
your feet noisy on the ground.
When another day was finally shadowed,
his sisters watched him leave their mother—
hurry to follow the storm.
The curving road has no mimosa, only shadows
in passing that eye him, figures mothered
on the shiny ground at the edge of a storm.
New Year's in Bao Loc
Later the cemetery was dug up,
the bones deposited in stacked clay jars.
We arrived when a few, over-confident stars
behind the mountains had just peered out.
Thanh lowered me onto mossy cement steps.
High above us, invisible bamboo clumps
poured out night, ceaseless, mournful cry.
A starling called piercingly one, twice—
wild, articulate sound—almost human.
I felt the hair on my neck, tiny bumps,
and bent down shivering, hugging my legs.
“There’s a girl down this way I love!”
I looked up, surprised to hear the word “love.”
Thanh’s back was hunched, his face hidden
Where ruddy light still caught the grass’s edge.
But, innocent, she didn’t love him.
Did earth each year grow so much darker?
Hands in his pockets, talking about the girl,
My cousin walked onto the windy road;
And as I listened, his voice had grown dim,
When, from above, came a moaning sound like words.
I jumped, and would’ve cried out at the thrill,
But saw him turning and braced to sit still—
Still, till wind and night’s cold engulfed me
And at length, cold, I wasn’t afraid.
Footsteps recently gone then ghosted back,
and Thanh, who talked eagerly at my side,
said soldiers who fought there and died,
their unhappy ghosts still wandered Bao Loc,
trapped in the geographic bottleneck.
Lovers out on clear evenings would meet
court guards in garish tunics, younger men
with rifles, muddy helmets in hand.
He got up, looked around listening,
said he didn’t realize, it was really late.
Then abruptly, decisively, he warned:
“Never, never come here by yourself, you hear?
Now let’s get on—get on, you’re cold and scared!”
I jumped, catching his neck, and throwing him
for the first time that night turned
to follow wide, mossy steps, up where
above a cloud of noisy-teeming leaves
the memeorial, one kerosene lamp to grieve
all those bones, always or just now lit,
gleamed amid bright, increasing stars.
Silently, fast, Thanh started running.
The charnel house, hazy yellow light,
tottered in retreat as I swung side to side
trying, while sandals drummed on the taut earth,
to look back: darkness... nothing...
But where we sat, something. I hung on,
but I was slipping; each time my head
swung round, I saw the standing shadow in red,
imperial blood-red; and at that distance,
the clear gap between his feet and the ground.
Heart Like a Hanging Lute
1.
We watched the bending smoke, Our Lady
of Guadalupe lit within by a dying wick—
candlelight in unexpected mirrored surfaces,
in the window peering sideways at us
and my roommate’s guitar on the couch.
Remember, his sister said, we’d camp out
in the empty, rain-battered house?
With lowered eyes, Dee was faintly smiling.
The abandoned house I, in turn, remembered:
everyone gone, blankets and sheets
held the dark in darker boxes, mazy alcoves;
our electric fans I gathered to make a storm.
There, again! Dee said, and this time
we saw the reddish light flashing outside;
waited for the arriving, till-now-unheard report.
At a window I saw the blue-black
thunderheads driving furiously toward us,
and unthinking or morose, picked up the guitar.
Jess spoke quickly, stopped in the cry
from the magnolia of a storm-sheltering bird.
The blast struck near us, the apartment burned
molten white—dark—where the shadowy
brother, sister stood, wavering to move.
Dee’s guitar hummed, quietly jarring my hands.
2.
Moonlight crashed against the dock—recurrent, woodensound of a distant buoy, just now vanished.
On the other shore, smeared against darkness, rainbow-
colored lights climbed invisible smokestacks.
How remote we were, and how late,
the wing-flecks up there told us.
“I didn’t think you’d come down so soon,” Lunch Box said.
The clock was striking ten we returned to the house.
I caught the red reflected door, and later,
dreamed faces in Damascene water.
3.
Festival day, at home. May,
Month of Mary, Mother of God.
The procession wound up the hill,
round our church, into a hymn
of the combined, staggered choir.
The music and smoke, and redolence
of flowers and incense... Mary
would turn to look back—neighbors
pressed against my sides—
the while priest and acolytes,
chancel and icons went up
in votive candlelight.
I knelt or sat, watching my hands.
Voices suppliant sweetly sank,
now launched high hosannas.
It was evening when we got out.
My neighbor walked shakily in front,
cheerful friends caught me from behind
with a joke—the crowd in a high,
cool wind unbalanced, giddy.
It was a while gettting to our cars,
while I was full of strange cunning,
who’d tasted the mutual bread
and drunk the exotic wine.
Notes
The poems in this sequence each remixes a tale of horror by Edgar Alan Poe, as follows: “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” The epigraph to the first reads in full: Son coeur est un luth suspendu; Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.
In Winter
Sleep and all dream woke
to ambush morning, chirping clear,
clamoring as glass; we shambled to
the car – a gleaming-cold, dewy night.
The postcard town opened its scenic lanes for us,
beneath tapering trees, to the Teaching
Museum, railroad, thruway. Column
of light – goodbye that took you in.
For me, sleep did not return; I got up
on dark scenery when the rooms fell,
watching a coffee cup.
Rock bottom had become clear ice,
white light sealed windows I held and
the sun stumbled over the house,
antagonist, injured one-eye.
Turtles
(A phenomenological evening)
“Screw you, Anne, and your email full of insinuations,”
she begins to write, as outside rain begins to fall.
But how commit to such a tone? she knows, dangit,
and stands to watch the sunset, orange, muted
through that much rain—awesome Klangfarbenmelodie.
To be a bird as day grows dark. Was it like death?
that her hatred would cease. And to die a bird...
What’s this thing wafts up between fireflies,
there in shiny grass, beats broadly, sinks yellowly
out, Jonesboro, Georgia crumbles.
The Pequod In Moonlight
In that nest the ocean’s movement’s
your own, and waking or dreaming expands
the curtain of stars, mingled in the water’s stars.
You gaze out so far, the mind recoils—
or so inward, sky’s mind’s radiant lining;
You see your body out of huge dreaming falling—
falling, but nothing comes back to be horrified,
senseless, brackish wind possessed
by one brute omen: swaying, the ship angles
exactly forward; the future arriving explains
itself endlessly. Then fate is no mere excuse,
in another universe sailors
of the nations wake in raucous song and dance.
The ocean this moment wholly stilled,
look for blue skies above, no bird but feather-
soaked, for months precarious and high.
Midfall
Within yellowed leaves, among faces
long ago taken, the man stands by himself,
leaning on a tamarind of the courtyard.
Behind him, brothers are walking fast,
people rushing by on the busy street:
through scant iron fencing, bright conical
hats like lanterns, crowding a river.
Above black cassock, the youthful face
has begun to fade; the sun, out of frame,
glaringly shines, sunlight broken through
dense foliage, to skin and gloss, erasing
what’s left behind.
Slow conversation:
Auntie is with my mother—
sit talking in the night kitchen, sisters-
in-law across one yellow kerosene lamp.
Cousin and I grab the roof’s low parapet,
strain our eyes into darkness, where—soon now—
a festival wounds the corner; carried
on swells of drums and voices, carrying blazing
torches, moons, stars—cages and creatures of light
push through in breathless procession.
Migration
Seeing her at the kitchen door, peeling green squash
for dinner, the boy comes in, begs for a story.
He wouldn’t relent; she tells him she was ten
when the French came to her village.
Nextdoor Old Nu, too weak to run, hid inside,
but they set fire to the house—
flames poured down, the man crawled out
to the field, where one saw him and fired.
Bullet pierced the hand
on his face, breaking his teeth.
That night children found him, still alive.
The boy winces; she drops the knife onto soft parings,
stands and takes the basket in.
No choice now but to return
to his friends and their cruel and insipid games.
He remembers how, weeks after
his father died, they were eating in the empty
front room still smelling
of flowers and incense, when termites swarmed
into the house, filled the house
with dense, frantic flying.
Running, the boy caught and squeezed
a termite in his hand, and was sickened by the stink.
Outside, he heard his brothers shout—
she was still standing on the straw mat
holding the bowl at her chest,
the termites a white cloud about her.
Mt. Pinatubo
Days before rain June sweltered,
there came news of Pinatubo
waking again from long slumber.
I watched at a window the weave
of hills in the east. My mother,
hanging clothes on the line, on her toes,
had paused for thought—sun painted
gold her flared hat and sweat-beaded arms.
Tilting back her hat she came in
under the altar, joss sticks burned
in dear remembrance; smoke ribbons
uncoiled, dispersing fragrance.
That night I dreamt Cao Hill
where our town farmed was a volcano—
woke then to graying darkness,
starless sky in the open window.
Stumbling to the water vat,
I found her watching the built fire,
her uncombed hair on her shoulders.
We sat lulled by the sound of fire
under the water pot’s mild gurgling.
Light rising slowly dimmed again.
Faraway church bells pealed for Mass.
We didn’t move, but looked out
where rain and ash had begun,
like manna, brightening, softening
the ground for those waking to sleep.
Eclipse
9 pm,
the cactus bloomed,
long, white petals
like sleeves of mercy.
My neighbor
sat out on the verdant balcony
in his going-blind mother’s old,
white dress.
Last month in an alley he’d
goaded some thugs
(in the evening folk noticed
the noise)
into commotion.
He could’ve died, someone said.
A girl and a boy passing
on the street, unknowing,
were mystified;
they together looked up.
Mild fragrance
drifted where we sat.
Was it fragrance,
shaggy flower heads, powdered face
floating there, held us?
to bracket now the twice-gibbous,
brightening full moon.
Scene in a Drought
This afternoon the bucket’s murky;
he stares down the well, then sits
out of sunlight to let the water settle.
She wipes her damp face on her shirt,
the embers grown white with ash,
and gets up to sweep the floor.
Dust filters fast into that little space—
blown in, or fallen from the walls,
tin roof and blackened beams.
Surprised at the quickness of dust
hiding her feet, she recalls her youth,
childhood, in a town constantly out waiting.
One long sweep of the broom,
a cloud of dust whisks into the light
in which her younger husband—
she can’t see his face, his body
in a coruscation of dust motes
turned by local, dry wind.
Two Seasons
July, baked earth spewed red
flood of ants: ants swarmed the kitchen,
climbing onto counter, cabinets and walls.
My brother went with a flyswatter,
ant carcasses dirtied the floor,
dimmed bright window-screens.
A swipe across their path killed dozens,
but their lines pulled taut again
not stopping to wonder or assess.
Through every gap they poured in
while we hurried to hide foods
and sweep around the bare table.
----------------------
What sleep, what sleep kept us
from hearing? The streets shone green
with leaves, our neighbor’s oak stood
broken where we looked.
Slanting in wind, rain returned;
cool morning darkened to sadden us.
The ants were again on the move,
their mound, a spreading puddle of mud.
My brother decided to go out.
Sweeping house dust out, into steady rain,
our neighbor paused with the broom,
watching their still-slow progress.
Signs
Weeks now it’s been raining
as though the tropics, as in dreams,
follows me to temperate country.
I haven’t seen the TV in days and don’t know
where the storm fronts are.
Sunflowers in the yard have all bowed down
to rain and wind.
Earlier, going outside,
to the deck, swimming dark
branches and leaves, I stepped
into the reflection of the house,
the neighbor’s house, the neighborhood,
windows lit, in a lake midair.
I said to myself
that things finally show
for what they are—
But midnight and it’s still raining,
the heavy drops whirling, crashing,
haul from above the faintest light,
not street- or moon-light or stars.
Sunflowers, facedown, begin to rise.
Between clouds and rain an island of trees
opaquely looms. Past this, sound and shape
enjoin darkness equivocally.
2 Political Songs
1. Three kingdoms
The color scheme is blue: blue sky,
tree line, blue mountain lake
where blue and white clad warriors meet
arguing love and the one kingdom.
Calmly, one takes off, and soon
all three are dancing over the shimmering lake;
bare hands and swords carve
on water’s surface bright, vanishing words.
Then, change of season, palace corridors,
panoramic curtains, another duo-
chromatic, impossibly beautiful set-piece.
Cold fall, outside our breaths blotted out
a few, brightest stars. Cigarettes.
Years later, we’re talking reunification!
2. Concerto
The candidate in white suit’s down,
crumpled like a paper-ball, mid-stage,
dusk-stained in silent after-explosion.
In a corner of the frame, actors
leaping away—let the ebbing crowd,
let too-soon night and history receive them.
At a window I watch, under the shine of rain,
a city gather itself, cold to the bone;
await the descent of your hero-violin
over music like new waters, peaceably saying
there is, in movements imagined, more,
ever more cause for delicate scrolling.
O forgive me, we’re not naïve…
The Old Scholar: A Lament
Teacher, the thought of you
set me going this morning;
I left the fire and, myself
an old man, stood in the fog watching,
before a neighbor’s house,
inky boughs mid-sky
like a submerged, blurred word.
When I went in, sat down again, your brush
leaped from the edge of the flames,
in darkness with the flames
were still drafting words.
That summer, we village boys worked hard.
Bent into each heavy, careful stroke,
I listened to your unhurried steps
measuring the span of our house.
The mountains were like something out of an old painting,
the mountain tribes
loved their gentle, disciplined scholar—
but that summer, Mom said
you had returned for good.
You cried when the alphabet came.
Not yet experts, gladly we put aside
the inkwell and the brush.
And in time you’d relent
and learn to read the same, new words,
defeated/undefeated in the last.
When I look back to our far village,
grid of paddies and dikes, and the cursive
of an outgoing road, this morning I see only
the progression of a fluid, foreign script.
Notes
“Scholar” is a common translation of Ông Đồ, denoting, formerly, a literatus who has passed the lower civil service exams, but has not attained to office. “Scribe” is another possible translation, as many Ông Đồ made a living by teaching or writing Chinese script for hire. The speaker here is of my grandfather’s generation, who was born around the year 1900.
“Teacher” or Thầy is an old-fashioned form of address for one’s father.
The Palm in Valdosta
Not disorder the brash clash, but elaborate calm,
beautiful infinity we studied
in the hot and mildewed building
one condensed, industrious summer.
We zoomed into whole other worlds,
on key taps, in substance we came
to believe, to image with open eyes
scenes before we opened to them.
Stark dazzling sun, dreaming weltered
in dark blazing sun; white, frenzied leaves;
by the end, incessant rainfall
while a galaxy-shaped storm cloud
drew vulnerable seas beyond horizon.
Night it cleared we brought lawn chairs out
under the slow-turning sky, prized space
between still-wobbly pixels of light.
Conversation
After heavy rain pine straw in the winding
flowerbeds had coalesced
in sinuous waves
beneath shiny stalks, petals
and leaves honed sharp by the recalled sun.
The room was unlighted, but not dim;
in a substantial shaft of light the light specks
were silently whirling, vanishing
arabesques, whirling—the ghosts of words
awkwardly spoken.
All over the world, I said, war
and war’s attendants are burning.
Our world, my friend said, is the veneer,
broken, of forgotten worlds.
For long now nothing’s been new,
for so long there’s been nowhere for us
to turn, to step, without finding there,
in mud or in dust, the fitful paths layered.
We fear ambush. What’s that doubtful, ashen
debris when your tongue touches air?
Too stricken to protest, I looked down
onto the carpet between us, dust-
prints of boxes superimposed
on a faded riotous design, halos of water
stains that bloomed years back
when the then-office-building flooded.
Rapid steps passed below on drying walks,
a chair scraped the floor just overhead.
My friend looked long at me as in reproach.
Cave of the 40 Thieves
Some people are so intent
on being unhappy you think
they were born to be unhappy.
Eventually, you think unhappiness
must be a kind of happiness for them.
Because I loved him, I said to him
our parents and grandparents
were their lives poor,
but what does that matter?
We must cease to think
we’re above it all.
Let others go into the woods,
look at the trees and return merry.
Look at yourself!
Your threadbare clothes,
your matted hair,
don’t they demean you?
Even more, when you don’t care?
When I left he followed me
down the road, talking in my ear,
and as I looked at him, his face
solemn, serious...
I was thinking nights we were little
I lay awake and his crying
led my mind in the dark
through the windy house
while outside thunder
surged and rain strengthened.
Light on this gold trickles like water.
What was it he said?
But isn’t it beautiful just to look at!
What was it that trailed me
at the town’s edge, in wind
galloping?
Notes
The speaker is Ali Baba’s older brother, in reverie before treasures, before he is discovered by the forty thieves.
Convalescent
At 4 a.m. began
the soft, murmuring coo
in the azalea bush
right outside, below his window.
Soon, distant answers came,
beyond the hospital yard,
in valley and hills, timid
signal trails raising dawn.
Closing his eyes, he’s back
in his mother’s kitchen at home:
summer afternoon the hammock swings up
as though compelled
and for an instant
each time he feels weightless,
a leaf in air, weightless
before pulled down and
again begins to fall,
the hammock like an ocean of waves.
His mother is old, her hair white
and thin; and was there
ever an afternoon he lay
in the hammock in the kitchen
wanting to dream
for summer’s large quietude?
He totters to the window
to lift pale, translucent blinds.
A planet or star
is the only light above the city,
but it’s so bright.
It hits him,
the clear drop down,
the tiny shrubs,
chirrups and coos
rushing up so faintly he can’t be sure
they’re from below, outside.
Light whitens
the mirror of a building’s side,
flushes vision in burning eyes.
He falls onto the cold window glass,
in the city fevering.
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