stillitcomes

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One summer she goes into the field as usual
stopping for a bit at the pool where she often
looks at herself, to see
if she detects any changes. She sees
the same person, the horrible mantle
of daughterliness still clinging to her.

The sun seems, in the water, very close.
That's my uncle spying again, she thinks—
everything in nature is in some way her relative.
I am never alone, she thinks,
turning the thought into a prayer.
Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer.

No one understands anymore
how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers.
Also that he embraced her, right there,
with her uncle watching. She remembers
sunlight flashing on his bare arms.

This is the last moment she remembers clearly.
Then the dark god bore her away.

She also remembers, less clearly,
the chilling insight that from this moment
she couldn't live without him again.

The girl who disappears from the pool
will never return. A woman will return,
looking for the girl she was.

She stands by the pool saying, from time to time,
I was abducted, but it sounds
wrong to her, nothing like what she felt.
Then she says, I was not abducted.
Then she says, I offered myself, I wanted
to escape my body. Even, sometimes,
I willed this. But ignorance

cannot will knowledge. Ignorance
wills something imagined, which it believes exists.

All the different nouns—
she says them in rotation.
Death, husband, god, stranger.
Everything sounds so simple, so conventional.
I must have been, she thinks, a simple girl.

She can't remember herself as that person
but she keeps thinking the pool will remember
and explain to her the meaning of her prayer
so she can understand
whether it was answered or not.

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After attending a talk where Kuo Jiang Hong spoke about how she once asked her mother whether her late father, Kuo Pao Kun, was really a Communist.
(Further context for non-Singaporeans: in our country's early years, the government was very militant in purging all traces of communism. Kuo Pao Kun, a playwright who wrote very political plays, was detained for over four years without trial on communist conspiracy charges, among others.)

The flipside of a conviction is an acquittal.
The upside of total despair is my denial.
There can be no downside.
There can be no middle ground
in this memory of home written on bare walls.
One man's life pivots upon a cutting edge
so let's pray the wind doesn't blow.
When innocence falls by the wayside
the flipside of anger is a calm demeanour.
But silence can be a strength, just as
too many words can be troublesome.
Do not trade kisses for hard knocks.
Do not trade your eye for my tooth.
There are nightmares we do not rise from
while too much time has taken flight.
The curbside of a road is where
the wildflowers come to life.
The flipside of a flipside brings us
somewhere else. And we cannot be sure
if we have turned or returned.
In the end there is only my conviction.
Do not doubt me or your father. Just come
warm your frigid hands by the fireside.
The flipside of a prolonged winter is
this incandescent bulb that pretends to be the sun.

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And Still It Comes

like a downhill brakes-burned freight train
full of pig iron ingots, full of lead
life-size statues of Richard Nixon,
like an avalanche of smoke and black fog
lashed by bent pins, the broken-off tips
of switchblade knives, the dust of dried offal,
remorseless, it comes, faster when you turn your back,
faster when you turn to face it,
like a fine rain, then colder showers,
then downpour to razor sleet, then egg-size hail,
fist-size, then jagged
laser, shrapnel hail
thudding and tearing like footsteps
of drunk gods or fathers; it comes
polite, loutish, assured, suave,
breathing through its mouth
(which is a hole eaten by a cave),
it comes like an elephant annoyed,
like a black mamba terrified, it slides
down the valley, grease on grease,
like fire eating birds’ nests,
like fire melting the fuzz
off a baby’s skull, still it comes: mute
and gorging, never
to cease, insatiable, gorging
and mute.

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For Detroit

There are birds here,
so many birds here
is what I was trying to say
when they said those birds were metaphors
for what is trapped
between buildings
and buildings. No.
The birds are here
to root around for bread
the girl’s hands tear
and toss like confetti. No,
I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
I said confetti, and no
not the confetti
a tank can make of a building.
I mean the confetti
a boy can’t stop smiling about
and no his smile isn’t much
like a skeleton at all. And no
his neighborhood is not like a war zone.
I am trying to say
his neighborhood
is as tattered and feathered
as anything else,
as shadow pierced by sun
and light parted
by shadow-dance as anything else,
but they won’t stop saying
how lovely the ruins,
how ruined the lovely
children must be in that birdless city.

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Because my husband would not read my poems,
I wrote one about how I did not love him.
In lines of strict iambic pentameter,
I detailed his coldness, his lack of humor.
It felt good to do this.

Stanza by stanza, I grew bolder and bolder.
Towards the end, struck by inspiration,
I wrote about my old boyfriend,
a boy I had not loved enough to marry
but who could make me laugh and laugh.
I wrote about a night years after we parted
when my husband's coldness drove me from the house
and back to my old boyfriend.
I even included the name of a seedy motel
well-known for hosting quickies.
I have a talent for verisimilitude.

In sensuous images, I described
how my boyfriend and I stripped off our clothes,
got into bed, and kissed and kissed,
then spent half the night telling jokes,
many of them about my husband.
I left the ending deliberately ambiguous,
then hid the poem away
in an old trunk in the basement.

You know how this story ends,
how my husband one day loses something,
goes into the basement,
and rummages through the old trunk,
how he uncovers the hidden poem
and sits down to read it.

But do you hear the strange sounds
that floated up the stairs that day,
the sounds of an animal, its paw caught
in one of those traps with teeth of steel?
Do you see the wounded creature
at the bottom of the stairs,
his shoulders hunched over and shaking,
fist in his mouth and choking back sobs?
It was my husband paying tribute to my art.

Image version (original is also right-aligned but i couldn't do that in lemmy)

The first sound was the quieting
of my fingers brushing
the first, brief shocks of hair
from your head. Still. There
when our father said
we had five seconds to cry
before he’d get angry
or cry himself. When the child psychiatrist
watched you play
with ghosts, diagnosed
seems like a perfectly happy
child to me. Am I

both or neither of us
now? My fingers through your hair
aren’t so much fingers
anymore. My touch not so much
touch. Only breeze, your dark hair
like mine, this absence
you’ll hear now and for the rest of
our lives. Half-drowned
tree in the lake shrouded
in mist. Listening, beyond
the doorway of that haunted
shore where you wake
from every dream, our mother saying,
I speak with the dead. If I can

reach and hold across this always,
these galaxies, your forehead
like a steaming cup
to my lips. If I can mouth my silent swan-
song into you, know this without
my saying it: Brother,
lend your ear. There are many
different ways to sing yourself
to sleep. Like in your head? Our father pleads.
No, she mouths. Like I’m speaking
to you now.

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To pull the metal splinter from my palm
my father recited a story in a low voice.
I watched his lovely face and not the blade.
Before the story ended, he’d removed
the iron sliver I thought I’d die from.

I can’t remember the tale,
but hear his voice still, a well
of dark water, a prayer.
And I recall his hands,
two measures of tenderness
he laid against my face,
the flames of discipline
he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon
you would have thought you saw a man
planting something in a boy’s palm,
a silver tear, a tiny flame.
Had you followed that boy
you would have arrived here,
where I bend over my wife’s right hand.

Look how I shave her thumbnail down
so carefully she feels no pain.
Watch as I lift the splinter out.
I was seven when my father
took my hand like this,
and I did not hold that shard
between my fingers and think,
Metal that will bury me,
christen it Little Assassin,
Ore Going Deep for My Heart.
And I did not lift up my wound and cry,
Death visited here!
I did what a child does
when he’s given something to keep.
I kissed my father.