19 Fragments of Youth, Athirst
"Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?"--Whitman
V: 1990
One month after my third birthday, the burning kite returned on the other side of the world: history or luck, it is hard to say.
On the evening of June 29th, my grandmother sat on her red bucket, her hopes abloom,
as she sang a lullaby into a small red and blue envelope,
my name inked like web and tea-stain
onto the front of the 5-cent envelope in nervous, new letters
the shape of a calculus she had been diligently studying
as a way to fend off the inevitable,
for she'd learned as a child to write and to sing,
the way you raise incense before oranges and tarnished coins,
as an exercise in saving a life--gestural.
and poured her entirety into the pocket between gum and breath and paper.
She finished the final rhyme and breathed strange sounds into the flap,
as she sealed the triangle with a kiss of red candle wax
and whispered dreams stitched with incense and potassium and egg yolk.
Then, suddenly, light entered into her kitchen as a dropped spoon
and she turned and waited to make sense of the story unfolding before her
and paused, an accordion flapping love songs across the alleyway and of her:
And the fish appeared, like love or hail or premonition.
Just as in the year I was born, the eel again,
and it slipstreamed into her
life through the moldy kitchen and the fallow laundry drying:
dragon-light and eggplant hued,
and change burst upon the world and my grandmother waited to see where the eel would river to, circling.
And circle it did, a few times in the corner until it spotted her red bucket, entwining itself
like wind around a tossed-aside styrofoam cup,
and along the shoulders of the bucket and she listened to its gasp
and she listened also to the frantic knocking of the neighbor's threats and admonitions,
from whom it had escaped, in search of something more fundamental.
The water-bound seeks the dried riverbed for love.
And in that moment, my grandmother placed my letter on the table,--
between an eel appearing and a letter embarking what really is the choice,--
and reached down and embraced the fish as her own,
body to breath, guttural language to syllabic hope,
and held it against her body and the eel softened
and my grandmother closed her eyes
and wept.
They both knew:
the time had come,
when land and nation and certainty move and there is but soul choice
when one must be ready to depart.
death or reshaping or something simpler.
The this of the that and
the move through transformation out and in.
And we all,
eel and grandmother and family hope
shifted
and I have been ready ever since.
VI: 1999
The year I learned that my heart was not easily taken, I tried to give it away
along the tunnel of a peeling street in Taichung.
A boy walked up and demand me a kiss, I smiled and thought of the River Lu:
frozen in winter and shifting beneath my heart gup, as my lungs tugged in time.
I let him nip me and allowed him to taste the river inside my insides, whistles through my muscles
I his Penelope
but he was only concerned with my tongue and breasts and could not hear the story I was trying to tell him.
I let him take what he wished and in his greed and deafness he didn’t comprehend what I was willing to give:
the story of my life, caught up in wind and of horses and light like cricket song.
The next morning, I walked out into the light and I was free
I had survived my life, again
