LIVING QUARTERS
ADRIENNE SU
MANIC D PRESS
SAN FRANCISCO
Living Quarters ©2015 by Adrienne Su. All rights reserved. Published by Manic D Press. For information, contact Manic D Press, PO Box 410804, San Francisco CA 94141 www.manicdpress.com
Printed in the USA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Su, Adrienne, 1967-
[Poems. Selections]
Living quarters / Adrienne Su.
pages; cm
ISBN 978-1-933149-89-9 (trade pbk. original : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PS3569.U13A6 2015
811’.54––dc23
2014044711
FOR PEOPLE AND ANIMALS WHO HAVE NO HOME
ALSO BY ADRIENNE SU
MIDDLE KINGDOM
SANCTUARY
HAVING NONE OF IT
CONTENTS
I
Earthbound
Chinese Parsley
Contentment
1980
Kitchen
Sunday Dinner
Asian Shrimp
At the Checkout
Supermarket Fruits
When More is Better
Dessert
In Late November
The Wife
Rosemary
II
Turning in Early
Leisure
Complaint
Insomnia
To Stay in Place
Bronchitis
Affliction
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Practice
Bathtime
The Frost Place
To a Limited Extent
Into a Rock
On Writing
III
Weeding
Backyard
On Being Criticized for Coming from Suburbia
July
Raspberry Patch
Ownership
Grief
Sage
The Rosemary, Outside
Tomatoes
Mortals
April
First Garden
Inclinations
IV
Procrastination
Achievement
Technology
By the Sea
On Seldom Going to the Movies
Land of Plenty
Youth
If Only I’d Met You Earlier
Radiology
Downward Dog
Learning Cursive
Twenty-Two
Adaptation
To a Student Dying Young
Acknowledgments
I
The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.
– Adrienne Rich
Earthbound
If anticipation
is the high point of travel,
we ought to vacation
at home, reading manuals,
marking vintage hotels
and undiscovered vistas,
composing the meals
strangers will make us,
just as, lacking money,
I once took Italian
at the state university,
cooked from Marcella Hazan,
Although it was Iowa City,
that summer still resonates
as the summer of Italy.
I distinguished myself in class
by having no plans to travel.
Others were making it happen,
flying standby, lodging in hostels.
I must have wanted a kingdom
I could build in office or kitchen,
then be home by bedtime,
closing my eyes for vision.
Chinese Parsley
I never call it that.
It evokes too freely: checkers,
fire drill, ancient secret,
zodiac, laundry, whispers.
Does my culinary self
object, because it isn’t
parsley, or my research self,
because its homeland isn’t
China? One could venture
it has spent enough centuries
there to be considered
citizen. It goes so speedily
to seed, that’s thousands
of generations. If pressed
to explain my aversion
to the term, I would attest
to the difficulty, amid
shoppers and vegetables,
of trying to decide – is this
a taco / biryani / spring-roll
week, or is it minestrone /
steak / roast chicken? – when
all shorthand ends in parsley.
Cilantro’s the better partition.
Contentment
On obvious levels I long for it: daily
domestic certainty, light, familiarity,
the family dog, family. I see an armchair
reserved for the man (though that’s not fair),
a kitchen where pots are always astir,
clamoring little ones, invasions at Easter
and Christmas by in-laws, out-of-tune crowds
on birthdays, board games, sporting goods,
and downstairs or up, room for a child
who’s glimpsed her purpose to hide,
unseen but not unhappy, for most of the party.
As mother, I don’t see myself at all, in part
because the self is invisible outside mirrors
and photographs, in part because I’ll never
occupy that house, having found the sacred
space in my day, known what it had sentenced
me to, and accepted with the unequivocal
ease of a girl just old enough and viable.
1980
Mostly we waited, playing cards or Sorry!
in the basement, while the parents sipped tea
above us, salted melon seeds, dried plums,
and husks mounding up in the table’s center.
They spoke both languages; we spoke one;
we intended them to live forever.
That summer we had biked up and down
the neighborhood hills, earned permission
to cross one highway, and come around
to the normal contradictions, matters
of age and location. We could say it now:
what we shared was not as it appeared.
Dinner over, night coming on, we switched
to Monopoly. It lasted too long; the frigid
damp moved into our skinny frames.
We went upstairs, nibbled the occasional
plum, left the pit. The grownups sent us away,
switched dialects, laughed at untranslatable
anecdotes. That was the era when
we felt like tagalongs, too old to run
along and play, too young to go alone.
Later, dragged to Oriental Provision,
which smelled of fish and scallions,
we tiptoed around the owners’ children,
who wandered the aisles with dirty feet,
downcast faces, and nothing to read.
We didn’t all associate at school but usually
said hello. Only the parents were positioned
to fall into the circle – mirthful, otherworldly –
and seem to travel. We never made it in.
Kitchen
Site of dumpling party,
camp of holiday labor,
invaded by loose-leaf,
snack site, bar, pet station,
it makes dinner possible
but never makes dinner.
Kingdom of creative p
otential,
it has drained creative potential
for centuries. Now stocked
with life-source that, neglected,
turns sickness-source,
it has no proprietor,
only guest chefs who double
still reanimate all
who come from other rooms,
even if they’re grandmothers
or look like grandmothers
or know their way around.
Microwave, dishwasher, kettle:
they may do only one thing well
(or two), but let us let them try.
A room shall never own a person.
It is only a room.
Sunday Dinner
As if I didn’t have real work to do.
As if I had envisioned the nation my parents had.
As if the elders hadn’t promised something new.
I was confident, like other women, like children.
It couldn’t swallow me; I had had a chance to refuse.
And what I wanted was innocuous and common:
Everyone at a single table – never mind the unfinished
papers, taking up a place. The gravy boat we never used.
Now, as we flailed in the sea, it would have to float us.
Salvation didn’t happen, by ritual or rite.
The tragedy gathered slowly, litter on the road.
Babies wailed. Hungry all the time, lacking appetite,
I was finally ready. Someone said it in my head.
I’d do it myself. Red meat. Saturday. Whoever was left.
Just me? I was damned if I couldn’t consume that much flesh.
Asian Shrimp
What brute reduced forty-seven countries
and the foods of four billion to an entrée
so named? I prefer not to know, for the answer
will be too close: someone I already treasure
or passingly greet, who’s dwelled from birth
in my adopted town, who as a youth unearthed
a glittering kingdom interred in a remaindered
cookbook, then dreamed of it nightly but never
went, yet worked to bring a shadow of a replica
of what it seemed to be, to Dutch Pennsylvania.
At the Checkout
they almost always pause to ask the names
of greens: bok choy, collards, mizuna, mâche.
Today I’m rung up by sweet-faced teenage
JAMES, who scans at speed until he’s stopped
by the broccoli rabe. “What’s this?” he mutters,
and I nearly choke on the ways it is exalted –
with pancetta on penne, with clams, smothered
in garlic, souffléed, or blanched and salted –
while he enters the code. “Oh, baby broccoli,”
he reads, and rolls it out of his life. It’s not my age
or how I see, but how I fail and fail again to be,
that blinds me to what James perceives: broccoli babe.
Supermarket Fruits
Instead of ripening, they rot,
covertly, from the center.
Kiwi, mango, peach, pear
imitate what they are not,
fragrant lures for animals.
Obdurate, the fruits take on
the manner of a faux Cézanne,
ubiquitous, pretty, inedible.
Bought for their persuasive skins,
they betray the trusting tongue:
bitter, tannic, tart, long gone.
If only we were false like them,
we could use our perfect faces
to infiltrate private spaces.
When More Is Better
First all the critters must have your attention.
The animals are easier, not requiring reasons,
but the children have complexity. The interval
before they wake is always parenthetical,
unusable for news or meditation. Lunch
must be made, shoes found. You’re old enough
to know the alternative: days of silence, yielding
more silence, plus anxiety. Sometimes feeling
lost, you ask your self rhetorically what
she might do if you were found. She’d speak, but
she’s asleep. You were warned about all of it,
but all of it was in you, looking for an exit.
When no one demanded your life, you gave it over
anyway, to whoever was nearby. All was better
when you made someone, and someone else,
tiny, hungry. Sometimes when sleep is scarce
and you’ve exploded your dowdiness quotient,
you dream of paradise, but where? At the Giant,
pushing the cart of offspring and perishables,
mentally packing your rucksack of breakables
and dry-clean-onlys, you know how the story
would end. It wouldn’t even be literary.
Dessert
One day we’ll be inconsolable by sugar.
Non-nourishing? Non-essential? Whoever
says it surely lines up ducks so as to strike
them down with neither grief nor appetite.
In Late November
Having spurned the anonymous frozen hulks
in supermarket rows, we’re face to face
or face to beak with knowledge: we plan to salt
a bird that, down the street, still starts each day
without foreboding, as if being moved from grass
to grass to eat, then eat, were a human benevolence,
a gift from strong to meek. The kindest path.
Yet when the day arrives, despite not having met
the flock, I wake in dread, aware of my nature.
I’ve been staying up late, planning the feast,
what to do with the leftover flesh, as the Mayflower
tale unfolds for the next generation. At least
now they include some gore (just a smidgen:
boat diseased, some deaths). Meeting the farmer,
I picture the hundred dismembered chickens
I’ve known only as limbs this year and wonder
which of my crimes is the worst. “You can’t
get a fresher bird,” he says. “This turkey
was walking around this morning.” A pang
illuminates the absent-minded grocery
runs I make all year. For what are we thankful?
A roof, hot meals, each other, the possible end
of two wars. Gratitude mixes with animal
feelings or thoughts, whatever they are when
they come without words. It’s my favorite
holiday – no gifts, no faith or its baggage –
but it too has its tidy scriptures, an edited
version for children. I take the package.
The Wife
She was nothing. I was she. Even
though she understood, the pouring
of silvery light into the kitchen
each brisk newlywed morning,
the crackling of loaves being lifted
from the stone, the blackness of tea
made days unfold as if divinely scripted,
as if all were a discipline, universally
obeyed. The lack of plans, the hunger
of the ocean, the slight uncertainty
about necessities created neither
fear nor worry; all who were officially
we would find their way. A man
would protect his home. The community
had ratified it; there were documents.
In many directions lay the imagery
of peace: the neighbors’ quince trees,
orderly gardens, dogs who never
gave chase. There was ambiguity
of duty, money was tight, failures
went unassigned, but many had lived
with worse. Ea
ch day yielded a little
more peace. The rain let up, or fuzzy mist
shrouded the hills, which were beautiful.
Like the tide, like the sun going pink
and waning while she boned the bird
or turned the carrots, the radio her link
to agents of consequence, it unfurled,
her life, theirs. What was meant
to happen did, and just as in
any accident, they’d later count
the hundred ways it might have been
better, less violent, or more profound.
Rosemary
Its name, compound of two, belies
the spikiness, assertive oil, power
to overtake. If it ever symbolized
rule by woman, I didn’t know, even
as I nurtured one in bonsai form
while living like half a citizen;
of course it withered. It also carried
odors of memory, loyalty; brides
wore it in garlands; it was buried
with certain dead. Having treated it
as seasoning, I earned its desertion,
snipping too literally, only to eat it
(white beans, roast potatoes, lamb).
Its mystique dissolved like a woman’s:
neglected, turned colleague, custodian,
kitchen standby, bereft of desire,
it first dropped leaves, then paled despite
textbook care. I wrote off the failure
as bonsai fussiness, my ungreen thumb,
even as I moved from town to town,
convinced the magical day would come
when everything was transferred:
from story to myth, renter to owner,
early to late, tentative to empowered.
II
Grown, and miles from home, why do I shy
From every anonymous door-slam or dull eye?
– Jean Valentine
Turning in Early
Part centering of gravity,
part renouncing of company,
better in winter
but feasible always,
the aim is living larger
by private destination,
getting ahead of the sun.
So much is broken
by daylight that refuses
to reconcile,
rest may resist,
breath forget its depth,
but the site of forgetting