to make me feel like a movie star.
Land of Plenty
While others called their parents idiots,
tore up clean paper, and hid cigarettes,
I could barely crumple the lunch bag
my mother expected me to toss. Packed
with two journeys across the Pacific,
it looked like anyone else’s – sandwich,
apple, chips – but harbored decades
my parents seldom described. If only they’d
promoted guilt, I might have dodged
the reverence that put good teenage
idling out of reach. With other girls
I sauntered through malls. We curled
our hair, pleasing no one in particular.
But behind each afternoon lay the hunger
of those I couldn’t see, sapping the fun,
demanding purpose or at least a reason
for staring at ceilings, telling jokes
without punchlines, changing clothes
too often. When aunts and uncles
(everyone Chinese was “aunt” or “uncle”)
started pulling up in new cars and time
became our gold, it seemed a crime,
still, to order more than you could eat,
to have so many rooms to cool or heat.
Conscience cast me out; it was obvious
I couldn’t feign a moment’s carelessness.
What would I buy, not from clearance?
Where would I travel, given license?
Youth
Prospects were too many
once you reached the city.
Lack of obligation
trapped you at parties,
longing to be thirty.
Smart enough to skip grades,
you could have jumped to marriage.
Midlife would have shaken out
the same: independent, slightly
injured, unembarrassed.
Not in need of ups and downs,
you set out to endure them.
Happiness was way too easy,
so you went around the town
loving damaged persons,
being damaged in return,
and looking out each window
for the one who’d lived like you.
You would know when age had dawned.
There would be a signal.
If Only I’d Met You Earlier
We’re at it again. It’s hard not to rewrite
the years, though we couldn’t have known
they were wrong, if they were. Life
isn’t longer than it is, so off we go,
picturing what might have happened,
though one of us would have been taken,
or both, and one of us lived up north, one
by the warmest sea. We had no common
travel destinations, we rarely read
the same books, there wasn’t one same
friend, and either might have fled
when hope set in. Apologies, if made,
might not have been accepted. In truth
we could only have met on the street,
on one of your trips to the city. We’d both
have held back. The courage to speak
would have yielded “Excuse me,” no more,
all vision cordoned off by the sun.
So we might as well indulge in the words
for their sound: You would have been the one.
Radiology
When the tech starts asking questions –
“Where’d you go to school?” “What
do you teach?” – I brace for astonishment
that it’s English, not math or Chinese, but
she registers plain delight I’m a writer.
There must be no one in Radiology
to talk to. She seems to hope I can tell her
a story, but all I can muster is the anxiety
that trailed the impact, a week ago, and recall
how I sat with the coldest object I could find,
a bottle of water, on my head – no physical
ache of blood or bone, only the dread my mind
unleashed, its fortresses leveled by the blow.
I knew, without reason, he’d soon be gone,
everything canceled, the future mine, although
we had mapped it together: oceans, mountains,
avenues. Season of flower, season of ice –
wherever I wanted, he was going to take me.
The radiologist hopes I’ll talk about my life.
All I can offer is, “I thought bodily injury
wouldn’t ruin my work – I make my living
with my mind – but then I hit my head,”
at which she morphs into an angel, admitting,
“We aren’t in control of our destiny,” the best
small talk I’ve had all week. All the talk is small
compared to what he will say, the moment
he’s able. Half an hour later, the nurses call
me over: the scan has revealed no fragments
of bone. I know they were fragments of grief,
not bone. I must have wept them out that day
when he hurried over with ice in a cloth
and wrapped me in his arms, not quite the way
he would a few days later, when he no longer
loved me – out of ordinary human sentiment,
the way you put your arms around a stranger
you find at the scene of an accident:
commonly, to keep her warm for the interim
until, having moments ago entered your life,
she passes back out of it without a name
and into that of the first paramedic to arrive.
Downward Dog
Through the changes, the forms persist:
swan, eagle, cow’s head, warrior.
How many times have I lain in a twist,
attempting to exhale the sorrow
by swan, eagle, cow’s head, warrior?
I’ve failed again to seek what I require.
Every attempt to exhale the sorrow
only illumines the repetitive nature
of this failure to seek what I require.
How many times must I start from scratch?
Someday the repetitions of nature
must end, though the postures last:
how many times can I start from scratch
as bodies pile up? What looked like love
must end, though the postures last.
Again I admit what it really was
as the bodies part. What looked like love,
we were holding up like a bridge.
Now, admitting what it really was,
I also remember the joy, the surge
of strength in holding up the bridge
even as he withdrew the support,
cruel, unburdening. The joy, the surge
of strength are hard to detect as I mourn
but – even as he withdraws the support –
find grace I didn’t know I possessed.
Strength is hard to detect as I mourn,
but practice confers it, even at rest,
with grace I didn’t know I possessed.
In word and deed, he loved me back,
but practice confirms it, even at rest:
I’ve lost a thing I never had.
In word and deed, he loved me back.
How many times have I lain in a twist,
grieving for something I never had?
Through the changes, the forms persist.
Learning Cursive
From the Latin cursus, past participle
of currere, to run, it granted me a single
athletic form, the starting gun
smoothing the page. I favored a pen
that required some force (no gel, no felt)
and narrow ruling, to edge out glut.
Hand and brain traveled
in tandem,
enabling feet. Rhymes arrived; kingdoms
rose up to meet the encroaching lines.
Quieter than print but by no means silent,
it cut down thickets of stuck thought,
slashing the under- and over-wrought.
After the race, I read what was left.
Instructed to run, it had once again leapt.
Twenty-Two
You were thinking of the future
all along: that’s why you behaved
as you did. You moved like a fugitive
through weeks and months, your age
a talisman against ruin (though even
then you knew better), and nurtured
the favor of those who would never
reciprocate, who’d take your word
and not give it back. And you didn’t
even have that much fun: ahead
of the curve, you found the living
obligatory. But one thing you hated
was a know-it-all. And you had to be
ready: what if your life would be long?
You needed more. You needed a story,
a narrow escape, something to reflect on:
stupid jobs, bad company, disasters
professional, familial, romantic.
There was no requirement of failure,
but the alternative was pathetic:
to think out your life in your head
(for what a good brain was in it!),
do everything right the first or second
time, lie down dead, and live it.
Adaptation
Each day begins with the unwise thought
that the drowning could be reversed,
the house un-burned, the thief un-caught.
Distrusting all reason, I got what I sought,
a chance to repeat what I knew wouldn’t work,
beginning each day with the unwise thought
that like reading and writing, love can be taught.
I blame it on dreams, in which we’re un-cursed,
the house un-burned, the thief un-caught,
and time goes forward and back, as it ought.
We advance without mishap, having rehearsed
our beginnings and silenced the thoughts
we shouldn’t have spoken; thus un-fraught,
the house is burned, the thief is caught –
but sleep renders daylight’s wars un-fought,
renewing the malady mind would have nursed
away. Thus I begin with the unwise thought
of the house un-burned, the thief un-caught.
To a Student Dying Young
for Nate
My job was to prepare you, to send you into your life
knowing what to read – because no one has time
to read everything – and knowing what to write.
Even if you chose not to use them, you’d have tried
the ancient forms, learned how meaning dwells in rhyme.
My job was to prepare you, to send you into your life,
which gleamed not just with youth but with the light
that surrounds the exceptions, those unresigned
to the brevity of things. Assigning what to write,
I said “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”
might help: a son who asks his father not to die.
My job was to prepare you for the rest of your life,
so I tended to forget you were already in it, like
us your elders, running down the allotted time,
though reading everything and learning what to write.
Luckily you were the wiser, accepting each day and night
as a gift upon a gift, which is the gift you leave behind.
My job was to prepare you, to send you into your life
knowing what to read. Instead, you teach me what to write.
“To a Student Dying Young” is dedicated to the memory of Nathaniel Kirkland
1988-2009
Acknowledgments
Many thanks to the editors of these journals, where the following poems first appeared, some in slightly different form:
Asian American Literary Review: “Bathtime,” “Practice,” “Sunday
Dinner,” “Twenty-Two,” “When More Is Better”
Blue Lyra Review: “Land of Plenty,” “Procrastination”
Cavalier Literary Couture: “Asian Shrimp,” “Ownership”
Cerise Press: “April”
The Cincinnati Review: “Raspberry Patch”
ConnotationPress: An Online Artifact: “By the Sea,” “Chinese
Parsley,” “Mortals”
Crab Orchard Review: “1980,” “Rosemary”
Dickinson Magazine (online edition): “To a Student Dying
Young”
Dickinson Review: “Carlisle, Pennsylvania”
Hawai’i Pacific Review: “Achievement”
The Kenyon Review: “Backyard”
Massachusetts Review: “Grief”
New Ohio Review: “If Only I’d Met You Earlier”
The New Republic: “The Wife”
New England Review: “Contentment,” “On Writing”
New Ohio Review: “If Only I’d Met You Earlier”
Northwest Review: “On Seldom Going to the Movies”
Poet Lore: “Technology”
Prairie Schooner: “To a Limited Extent,” “Radiology”
Southwest Review: “First Garden”
Terminus: “Sage,” “The Frost Place”
“On Writing” appeared in Best American Poetry 2013
Quotation sources:
Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel,” The Complete Poems 1927-1929, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979.
Stanley Kunitz, “The Mulch,” The Collected Poems, W.W. Norton & Co., 2000.
Adrienne Rich, “Prospective Immigrants Please Note,” The Fact of a Doorframe, W.W. Norton & Co., 1984.
Jean Valentine, “Miles from Home,” Home Deep Blue, Alice James Books, 1988.
For their essential critiques of work in progress, much gratitude to Sharon O’Brien, Jennifer Joseph, Siobhan Phillips, Diana Rico, Claire Seiler, Faith Shearin, and Melanie Sumner. Many thanks, also, to Dickinson College and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown’s Returning Residency program, for support in the writing of these poems. And lifelong gratitude to my parents, Jennifer and Kendall Su, who made the first house home, and to the three who make today’s house home: Aisling, Dervla, and Star.
About the Author
Adrienne Su is the author of three previous books of poems, Middle Kingdom (Alice James Books, 1997), Sanctuary (Manic D Press, 2006), and Having None of It (Manic D Press, 2009). A native of Atlanta, she received an A.B. from Harvard College in 1989 and an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia in 1993. Her poetry awards include a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and writing residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, The Frost Place in Franconia, NH, Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Since 2000, she has taught English and Creative Writing at Dickinson College, where she is Poet-in-Residence.