—Vietnamese ghost tale
I tell you it is better this way.
I have taken the last coin from my eyes
and spent it on honey. The betel woman, her teeth
scarlet as the rooster's comb, is onto nothing
though her grandchild, the pretty one who hates
the old woman's dark spit, followed me
as I returned with my jar
of sweet light. I tell you they will come for you
in the evening. After the bell has called the women
from the fields. They will bring the men with torches
and with spades, and your father will place the bowl
of his ear to the ground and hear your long cry
trembling through the dirt. I tell you they will dig
for you, cracking the lid from this freshly laid box, pitch-sealed
and milkless. A woman will come forward, guide
your silt-caked head to her breast, and then the legend
of the child of death
will be born. Now as we wait, the tamarind fixed
above like stars, your mouth suckling
my honey-slicked fingers, I tell you
be her daughter. We had our chance.
reading
Ann Arbor
He just sat there
eating from the bowls of his hands.
When it was over the poets rushed out,
back into the bookjackets of their lives. He just sat quietly
warm in the droppings of words, belly full,
the complimentary wine rising in him. Outside
the long night waited to take him home.
Snow White
In some versions
he kisses me. In others
the glass coffin shatters,
the apple dislodges
its bruise from my throat.
However it happens,
he won't let me sleep—
this marital morning
the invasive clouds
festooned with ice.
some refrains Sam would have played had he been asked
You must remember nothing. Loyalty is as useless
as an assassination. Treaties broken like a night of glass.
I left Harlem to be my own man. Got shanghaied in Europe,
a theatre volatile as the moon. Pallid as a master race.
You've always been good at the carving up.
Like a butcher with his canvas of meats hacking a landscape
through the offal. What gets burned. As Paris is learning,
the stratagem of black folk is to grin and resist.
To you, rumors are like falling in love—not even as sound
as a spin of the wheel. Like the rising sun,
each atrocity millions of miles removed. How long
won't you believe? What you do to me they'll do to you.
Even here in this city of a white house, you dream of clouds
sprouting like black lungs. Your love comes back
like a particle falling from a higher state. It's then you remember
every dog has his requited day. I'm still due.
This is how it will end: a Japanese city named for an island
will beg for water. Each brown face adorned with the keloid star.
Even though you aren't sure, I know you have it in you. Ask my lord
if a kiss is just a kiss. Bwana, who's the boy now?
studio audience
Places everyone. The child star
darts in from the wings, game face hard
like a professional athlete
who doesn't have time to stop & think
tops I've only got two more seasons in me.
It's a half hour show, which means
twenty-three actual minutes of tape, the hook
formulated at fourteen minutes in then cut
to commercial. This is episode fifty-six:
“Two Green Thumbs.” Hijinks
ensue as little Timmy learns a hard life lesson.
From seats rowed like lettuce
we know when to laugh, pay no attention
to the men behind the curtain
because the overhead sign cues us, our response
prompt as clocks. Applause.
A headsetted woman stands on-camera, snaps
the board shut, scene 5 take 2, wipe back
to Timmy & Principal Blop & the denouement
which predictably comes at the twenty spot.
If a tree falls in the forest & there's no key grip around…
But this is scripted. A functional TV family with Dolby sound
& body mics & TDs & four & five
takes, “home” a pasteboard set with out-of-shot signs flashing live, live.
synopsis
It's what's inside most folk that scares ‘em.
—Clint Eastwood in High Plains Drifter
Finally, you paint the town red. You order up
two hundred gallons of crimson, one barbecued steer,
and tell the townspeople, “Get to work.”
The local midget you've named mayor and sheriff
is on your side. He was hiding under the saloon on the night
you were bullwhipped to death by Stacey and his cousins.
They've just been released from jail
after serving one year for a crime they didn't commit.
This time it's personal. They plan to empty
the mining company's safe, dynamite the whole place
if it comes to that. Because of the paint, people, you rename
the town Hell. Now there is nothing to do but wait
for Stacey and his cousins to ride in. You find time
for exactly two forcible rapes, though the next morning
the women are seen radiantly combing their hair.
The midget mayor/sheriff asks when you'll give the signal.
You tell him, “I won't give the signal. You will.”
High noon. Stacey and his cousins ride in
to find hoisted above the town's red square a banner
the local women have sewn together at your orders
with linen from the town's one red hotel. “Welcome home, boys!”
the banner says. In time Stacey and his cousins die
the kind of death men like Stacey and his cousins die.
Today the town is red and smoldering as are the women
who have acquired your taste. The midget mayor/sheriff
is busy with a knife. “I'm almost finished here,” he pipes.
In last night's shoot out, he killed a man. “Finished,” he says.
His handiwork is good. You take a last long look at Hell,
kick your horse in the ribs, tip your hat to the mayor/sheriff
and tell him through your teeth, “You knew it all along.”
for Sean
tradition
My mother says women were made to bleed
and the whole thing takes twenty minutes.
She says afterwards they'll wrap me up like a butterfly
for forty nights and I'll drink only camel's milk.
My mother says tomorrow
I'll be a little bride hands red with henna.
I'll be shining in white and get to wear as much gold
as I want. She says afterwards something will get killed
and the whole clan will come to eat
only they won't sit down
until I've been washed in the Nile.
My mother says tomorrow the blacksmith's wife
will cut away a part of me I don't need. She says
it might hurt if the blacksmith's wife
uses scissors instead of a knife. My sister says at her khefad
the blacksmith's wife used glass and then tied her shut
with acacia thorns and horsehair and Mother
had to remind her to put a match head in the wound
so the whole thing wouldn't heal c
losed
and my sister could still pee.
My aunt says up north they use something called cautery
which means they make that place burn like the sun.
My mother says I have nothing to fear
because women like us were made to bleed.
My mother says someday I'll meet a man
who'll want me smooth and small. She says we'll marry
and he'll take a dagger and slit me open
like a letter addressed just to him.
My mother says tomorrow I'll be a little bride. She says
the whole thing takes twenty minutes
and after forty days I'll come out just like her
smooth and small lips sealed.
triage
A gulf divides us, and there is no fairy bridge of birds to carry me across.
I. WHAT DUC SAID
For the most part, the small intestine is mine
as is the right hand and leg, the vena cava's dark pull
back to air. We share a bowel. A stump grows between us
like a radish so pale I suspect it shines when we sleep.
In your language you would say we are shaped like a T—
look closely and like the rain of airplanes
we will form before your eyes. Nights Viet dreams
of things north, of being left on mountains. Even the nurses
must learn to tolerate our form, our body wizened
like the burnt flocks that fall like a pogrom out of the sky.
II. WHAT VIET SAID
I don't like. To be alone.
When Due sleeps. I feel our third leg shining.
Like the hare in the moon. Like a flare.
It casts our shadow on the ceiling. I fear it.
This dense cloud hanging. Over me.
Half of it is. Out of my control.
III. WHAT THEY SAID
there are things we know that we cannot say:
that she will not love as she should: that she will not die
when she wants: this is our beginning: she is walking
through the fields: the tall grains whisper
between her thighs: an early star: then
it is raining: the caustic drops sudden: sharp
as the braid that cuts the baby from its mother:
she thinks of rice: of seeds massing in the wind:
teratically the rain brings on a night that bleeds:
under the stiff white hare of the moon: on a path
raised like a scar: something inside her clicks
as if her body has pulled out the pin on 12 million:
this is the time we spend in the ellipse of our mother:
in the land of the seagull and fox: in a place
where a young girl will not love as she should:
will not die when she wants:
IV. WHAT SCIENCE SAID
“There were about 72 million litres of toxic chemicals
sprayed over Vietnamese land and Vietnamese people
during the war. This amount of toxic chemicals
was contaminated by 200–500 kilograms
of Dioxin (2•3•7•8 Tetra- Chloro-Debenzo-Para-Dioxin (TCDD))
contained in Agent Orange. An American scientist estimated that
only 85 grams of 2•3•7•8 TCDD
can kill all 12 million citizens of New York City.”
V. WHAT I SAID
By conservative estimates the mangroves will not return
in this century. Neither will the eyes, the limbs twisted like roots.
Today Viet lies deep in the mosquito sickness—if he dies,
Due dies too. There will be no time for separation, no time to airlift
the split being into surgery. Instead, the living half will wait passively
for what invariably will come rolling on, the roofs filling with people.
I didn't ask to survive.
“’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land”
The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.
—Thomas Jefferson
In your first winter you will be pronounced
Seven. Someone will pay to name you
For a ship. You will owe your life
To tight packing, the hull racing to port, human cargo
Impacted like teeth. Within months the floes
Will dissipate, the thaw freeing
The harbor's dark trade. You will master the spoken
Word, then Euclidian principles, then history,
Then the systems of the night sky, Latin
And the Bible falling as well. Finally
You will write. You will have paper
At your bed and keep a log burning
Through the prodigal darkness.
Only once will you speak of your mother's
Genuflecting at the sun. You will be carted
From sitting room to room. You will be a thing of wonder.
Generals will write your name. Phillis. Phyllis.
Like the colonies you too will come and go.
vigil
And both the girls cried bitterly (though they hardly knew why) and clung to the Lion and kissed his mane and his nose and his paws and his great, sad eyes. Then he turned from them and walked out onto the top of the hill. And Lucy and Susan, crouching in the bushes, looked after him and this is what they saw.
—C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
Tonight we will function like women.
The snow has gone away, the ice with its amniotic glare.
I clasp my sister's tiny hand.
We will not turn away
Though spring, spring with its black appetite,
The lion was sad. He suffered us
To touch him. When I placed the bread of my hands
In his mammalian heat, I was reminded
That the world outside this world
Is all vinegar and gall, that to be a young girl at the foot of a god
Requires patience. Timing.
The White Witch has mustered her partisans.
Because I am fascinated by her bracelets strung with baby teeth,
I will remember her as the woman
Who grins with her wrists. From my thicket of heather
I note that in her own congenital way
She is pure, that tonight she ushers something new into the world.
I cannot stop it. I cannot stop it just as in that other place
I could not keep the planes with their spiked fires from coming.
Though in this closed realm the smell of camphor is overwhelming
I have nothing but my hands to use
In ministering to the dead. Here too
My hands must suffice.
Hush now while I testify. They are shaving him.
The corona of his mane falls away
Like pieces of money. In the moon's milk light
Her bangled wrists grin as she raises the blade.
Something is diffused. In whatever world he comes again
There will be women like us who choose to.
visitor
In hindsight the amazing thing wasn't her surviving
but the fact that a stranger entered her room.
Of course it's all supposition, nothing
too convicting. Perhaps they struggled.
Maybe he simply ordered her supine.
All they uncovered: a locked house, her bedroom door
slightly ajar, approximately four pints staining
her pillow, a one inch section atop the crown of her head
crushed as finely as herbs. Three days later
the paperweight came back from the lab
sticky with an unreadable palm, almost as if
someone were cupping it, racing to beat
a stack of papers before they stirred.
I'm not making this up. She was my sister's best friend,
a teen with more than a hundred sutures
embedded in her scalp. Like a dead tree she went on,
maintaining she remembered nothing
about the incident, each night
sleeping behind the same door
across from his, desperate to believe
in the official version, in planned randomness.
I can't tell you her name. I won't tell you
because it's all you'll remember, you'll lie down at night
thinking it doesn't apply.
Whitsunday
Everything that will ever happen has happened.
The scorpion sheds its dead cardiac light, the southern cross
burns its orienting pall on the world.
Even the moon of the green corn slants her grained face
at a redundant angle. Behold! The sky is black with old news
and each year the earth spins itself through the same six seasons.
Do you know who I am? Or should I say, “Do you accept?”
This afternoon my god wrote his name on my skin, the flesh abraded,
salt-white and million-eyed. Reader, my god is a god of love—
he is studded with stinging arms. He grants me iridescence,
second sight: everything I will ever be I have been. Behold!
The scorpion sheds its red thoracic eye, the southern cross
burns its pall on the world. Night. Glory. Corn. Lord.
Isn't it enough my whole body tastes white?
Whitsunday
Today on land a lesser being would robe itself in glass.
Instead you give birth to yourself—the planulae, the polyps
budding five thousand times, pulsing through the ocean
like bright ventricles. What is it about the power of seven?
I was alone and you came to me, I was bleeding
and the blurred thumbprints of your eyes sensed it.
I would say I was in love with you, with your munificent power
to divide. Your kingdom is briny and many-tongued;
it is a forest at the bottom of the sea. I was alone and you came
to me, I was bleeding and you flashed your lobed impassive face,
the cilia of your raiment like glass, each vitric whip signifying:
“On this day a ladder of blood came down from the sky.”