19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
I: 1986
The year I was born, my grandmother broke and the ghosts ran in,
and the world fractured as her favorite plate and all that she believed in,
green and speckled like chicken's feet and warm to the mouth,
the plate which had been mother'd by her mother and carried by her mother’s mother from a rusted village against a belly protected by sheep hair and jacket darning and superstition,
across water and 50 years and all that I would once become,
but her hope scattered across the linoleum like a constellation upset
when she saw the eel,
essence slither out of the bucket and away.
Long later, she would tell me that my beauty was that of the light struggling.
She waited until I was 10 to tell me of the eel escape and the red bucket
and my mother's broken water
but this was the only the beginning and I learned to be patient
with stories and with ghosts and with digestion.
For then, I was not yet born.
On days like this where the October copper pings cloud over browning hills
I walk into the sun and listen: her voice scrapping against the green and the air
and the scattering which is everywhere, birds, leaves, insect shells, rusting woks, the voices of school children,.
and the hearses which enumerate the days of the calendar more than the months previous.
All these things which brought me into this world.
All these things which brought me into.
All these things
into.
II: 1987
The year I turned away from my mother's breasts, my grandmother learned to speak again,
and I listened:
to the way my father's heart knocked a clock slower when turning from us;
to the horse hooves in the alleyway like a bell tucking and tocking;
to my sister crying over the tooth-broke piano key in our living room, falling;
to way the sun cracked the paint crippled along my crib by the window in January;
to the rain that picked itself up off the muddied street before the trash had been collected;
to the way the neighbor sighed each time he looked into my infant eyes,
and then wait and grew, week by week
does an infant calibrate the world as we so often do?
At the year’s end, I listened again, waiting--
my grandmother on the other side of the world
the sound of marbles in a glass jar or the goldfish taking gulps in pinwheel'd oxygen--
for her voice scribbled like a green dragon caught above, marionette'd by the wind: voice and ventriloquism,
and I scribbled with my teeth what I heard
her words stretched into me and fitted stronger than the new alphabet I was teething upon:
'Sin, Sin', Sin', the song only I had not yet learned and those S’s softer breath
the inky judgment and wall that was in fact shaped in the horse-ring curve of a C.
That was the year my name rang out for the first time,
and upon hearing it, I threaded my way back to Hong Kong
miraculous
following the compass of her syllables and breath and washed bok choi.
You see: she was teaching me navigation and journey with the shape of her mouth,
the waist of her words and the globe-long chain of her anchoring breath
and the command of her voice, drilled in to my heart,
“wear the world on your chest child, not for a man but for the song that will one day take you away from this
Let me tell you a song, long gone, people, so close your eyes and shape yourself into morning dew falling from the blade
crickets copping a feel of sun before the water, all shaped well and frozen, gives way to the death that brings anew,
so
size that!
