19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
III: 1988
The year I drew my first word from deep inside, my family stood still
as a pitch and sonorous swallow hooved forth: equine.
How could they not know my freedom would come in the shape of a word: steed.
Should they have known?
but still they were confused by the punctuated bursts,
a syntax of observations or a possibly running away
(later, I remind them):
I could not be torn from the horses in the field
and their story-shifting clops and blossoming turns.
"I am made of them, then," even if,
I could not stand upright fully, I crawled toward
the fit and size of that language
syllable and sound first, before my bones scaled to strides,
as an infant, I grew horse describing all that without a sizable base and language.
Was all this the summit and clap of dream?
Now, can you see, at two I learned a first desultory lesson: fictive freedom
more gene then gumption, even if I could not cough up its spelling and rhyme,
my life shaped into the lines and pauses of a word in the shape of a beast, softening.
“Tell me, from where things come?”
Answerless,
my heart was shaped by distant outer-sized things
instead of the laborious tedium of time and so many men, yet I was two.
And from that moment, though the words did not yet conjugate,
my body made sense of sounded thought and together the world's joinery unleashed
and I doubled in year and yelp.
Doubled.
IV: 1989
One month before my third birthday, the eel returned
and my grandmother leapt skyward as a cricket in heat.
and at that moment a world away,
synchronous,
my father taught me a first lesson in chemistry and burning:
how to set flame to a map and language and remembering.
While my grandmother re-arranged herself, my fist father became a teacher of broken alchemy.
He groomed me and turned the black sky vermilion and incandescent and alive,
and I burned.
An act of defied waking and guidance:
he lead me to a small hill behind our home and recited the truth of geography:
light lit in the groove of pliable things,
pinched an old map of the heavens, constellations shaped into the bodies of his worn hands,
calligraphy of sexton hearts
both hands crampons in altitude and paper word-strewn, characters that built our small house in a small town
and which, like the stories my grandmother told, looked like broken winter trees
my wakeful hope damp socks and
he looked then and I looked then and he then said:
"Sin, you will see how stars were meant to look when lit" and he struck the match:
and I sped and spread fathoms deep.
Beyond his outstretched arm, a copper lantern made of old paper and tears
and thumbprints carried from Hong Kong language and luggage and hope
become a burning kite of spark and wonder and names:
Orion, Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Ursa Minor, Carina, Pyxis, Lupus, Lyra, and my birth sign: Taurus.
And as the map crackled like my grandfather's rocking chair and my collar an old branch,
I saw the names scatter against the blue-dark sky and become characters from the old country:
心 (Xīn), 尾 (Wěi), 危 (Wēi), 鬼 (Guǐ), 張 (Zhāng), 翼 (Yì), 水委(Shui Wei)
and my birthmark: 馬尾 (Ma Wei, horse's tail).
And I followed the flame and listened to the sparkled words wing incandescent
at that moment, I felt the bones in my throat loosen
and my life unroped and my understanding unshirted and my body became borderless and words nomadic.
And once again, a shallow sky swallowed up the old map and my father's lantern and all I had doubted
and all I had glued together, memory
which he quickly crumpled up and we both, wing to claw, forgot
as if those unseen stones in the reedy river behind our house,
everything, everything or something particular, un upturned but.
even that which I did not then know but would ask about much later--
absence as presence
a map set fire and expanding brightly even as it fell apart, drop by black drop
and the drops of held pitch sealed my heart and hips, once spread cracking,
drop by begrimed drop,
dollop dip done.
its gift and its embargo and its meaning
as we march on the years under cover of eureka and euphemism
