A single row of wombs
Each with a single fruit.
Was there another fate,
Some other destiny murdered
On that damned island
Zanzibar
And thrown across
The Atlantic?
Did you live love in the
Canadian wilderness
Or did you dream it all,
Betrothed in your mother’s womb
To some African kin,
Marriage contract written
With a finger in fresh sand?
Did you call out
That night long past
Clinging to a frightened heart
While stars rushed by:
Cousin!
I am
Gone!
Who was your mother?
Empress.
And who was your father?
Orphan.
And who am I?
Great-grandmother
Did you know?
13.
I remember
You,
Anna.
I walk this narrow brick alley
Named after you and
Look for myself.
I come with someone you’d like
A friend,
A lover.
I try to see through this
White clapboard house
Into my beginnings.
Any history will do
For those who have none.
It seems you lived so long here
They named the street after you:
Johnson Alley,
House number seven,
Kingston, Toronto,
Ontario,
Canada.
The end of the line.
Great-grandmother
Did you know?
IV.
FROM MEMPHIS & PEKING
1965-1974
On the Terrace at 11 Nan Chihtze Street
Standing
On somebody’s terrace,
Feeling foreign,
Gazing at a city more like a Universe Forbidden,
Rising over Peking like flamingo wings, a
Hovering which is neither float nor flight
But a murmuring static in the still air,
The roofs of palaces and pavilions catching the last
Light as if the sun were their own reflection.
Corner towers rise to meet the descending mist
Which becomes a pale and smoky screen
Between the red walls of the city and my avid Western eyes,
Like the veils the emperor’s valets wore
So as not to contaminate him with their breath.
A breeze sweeps the moat as a Chinese character brush
Correctly poised, dips expertly into ink.
The Eastern Gate bangs with a hollow ring and a cry.
Hawk sparrows maneuver in the dusk.
Pale lights snap on, girding the yellow mall in a beaded belt,
Flattening passing navy figures into relief-less shadows.
Half hidden by willows, breeze-bent in oriental kowtow, the
Western Wind blows off the Gobi desert, bringing sand
And lifting clouds of ever-present Peking dust, that scuttles by.
Chinese conversation, soft and dissonant, lies below and about.
Scraped dishes echo off tiled walls like keys rattling,
And here and there a stubborn child lingers outside
Savoring the last swooning daylight before bed, while I,
Standing
On somebody’s terrace,
Feeling foreign,
Gazing at a city more like a Universe Forbidden,
Resist until the light leaps away.
The Divorce of Comrade Wu and Comrade Lui
I
The divorce of Comrade Wu and Comrade Lui
Was very banal indeed
And oddly enough
Came about on a Sunday
Through no fault
Of their own,
Merely
Because neither of them was willing
To waste a day off
On a
Divorce.
The Revolutionary Committee of Factory Number 4
(The Shining Sun Paint factory)
Decided once
And for all
The issue:
Comrade Wu and Comrade Lui
Would both take off a day from work,
Sunday, the 10th of May,
The year of our Lord 1965,
The year sixteen of the Revolution,
And so this day
They eat fried noodles
In silence.
In celebration?
The prisoner’s last meal.
And Comrade Wu stares at her yellow walls
With the poster of Mao Tse-tung
Hung there
And wonders
“Who will get the flat?”
And Comrade Lui stares at Comrade Wu and thinks:
“How long before I marry my love?”
And outside the Peking winter breaks
Against the window pane,
Humidifying it hopelessly,
Running down it
Haphazardly,
And inside the cotton curtains stick cloyingly to it
Like a shirt sticking to a man’s back on a hot day,
And outside
The silhouettes of Comrade Wu and Comrade Lui
Glisten in frosted silence,
And inside the central heating hisses
A Chinese vowel
As morning sounds infiltrate the paper-thin partitions.
Coughs and sneezes and morning-exercise music
Mingle in the dehydrated air
As slowly Comrade Wu gets up to do her morning
Tai chi chuan,
As slowly Comrade Wu gets up to
Say her imperturbable
And tight-lipped farewell In transfixed slow motion,
As together
They carry the tiger on the mountain,
And together
They part the wild horse’s mane on the right,
A flickering film of a pinpoint,
On the bottom of the sea,
Gliding and floating in the yellow room
Like goldfish,
Tails flapping in desperate directional starts at
Breaking out of pain’s circle.
Thus, they finish
The last morning together,
And together they leave,
Locking the door and walking slowly
To their bicycles leaning unchained
In the front hall,
Comrade Lui letting Comrade Wu pass in front
As silently they move onto the dusty road
And into the wide avenue,
Rowdy with morning bicycle traffic.
Dodging insolent pedestrians as
They pedal silently side by side.
II
Wordlessly they arrive
In the chilly unthawed morning
At 17 Nan Chu Street,
The Department of Family and Welfare
And are greeted by a neutral-eyed clerk
Who informs them
They are
Nine minutes late.
Before they can
Excuse themselves,
Already beginning to sweat
In their heavy winter coats
(Comrade Lui’s glasses
Steaming up),
A shadow behind a frosted glass door
Opens it and beckons them forward.
Comrade Wu passes
In front of
Comrade Lui
In her nervousness
And sits on one of the stiff-backed chairs
As if settling in
For a bad meal.
And Comrade Lui, entering
Seems to startle her
As if he wasn’t expected,
And he rises only half way Compressing his knees
To let her change places
As she brushes him with
The backs
Of hers,
As if there wasn’t
Twenty meters
Of gray limestone space
Before her.
And seated beside him,
Separated by the width of a double bed
She notices
The courtroom
Is painted
The same yellow
As her kitchen
(That 1963 surplus of yellow paint
At the Shining Sun Paint Factory)
And thinks:
“Who will get the flat?”
And Comrade Lui
Stares straight ahead and thinks:
“When will I marry my love?”
And the yellow walls
And the limestone floor
Glow in white neon iridescence while
The central heating hisses a
Chinese vowel.
And the tribunal files in
Behind a high and heavy podium
Fashioned in 1940,
Bureaucratic modern
With a red star
In the center.
Two men,
One woman,
And a woman scribe,
Their names neatly printed on
White cards
In front of their seats.
The last
Dinner party.
And the chairman,
His tinted glasses flashing
In a brief laser beam
Of pale sunlight,
Clears his throat
Under a portrait of
The Chairman Mao Tse-tung
Hung there.
III
Like two swimmers
In the Yangtze
Comrade Wu and Comrade Lui struggle through
Depths and currents of compromise,
Tides and undertows of banality,
Waves and breakers of desire,
Rocks and reefs of ego,
Gales and stiff winds of pride.
Like two soldiers on the Long March,
They labor over
Mounds of resentment and disappointment,
Canyons of boredom and misunderstandings,
Summits of mistakes and miscellaneous,
Precipices of money and in-laws,
Crevices of dependence and lies,
Gorges of defeat and recriminations,
Sitting in their straight-back chairs,
Sweating in their winter coats,
Separated by the width of a double bed,
They swim
And they climb,
Breathing deliberately.
Comrade Wu twists her handkerchief in small pale hands.
Comrade Lui’s strong brown ones
Rest spread out on his knees.
Deputy One insists
On a definition of
Corporal punishment.
His pale scalp gleams out of short cropped hair,
Deputy Two
Shuffles papers from
One delicate hand to the other
And asks:
“When did sexual relations stop?”
And Comrade Wu catches the eye of Chairman Chou
(So his place card says)
And asks with her eyes in no uncertain terms
“Who will get the flat?”
But the chairman, who lights up a cigarette
And whose eyes are obscured by
Rose-tinted glasses,
Merely asks how much money she makes
And Comrade Lui slumps beneath his second
Matrimonial disaster,
The visor of his cap
Tilting like a sinking ship,
And it is over.
Two men,
One woman,
And a woman scribe
Rise and announce
The case closed.
Doors open and shut,
Shadows fuzz and frost,
Feet shuffle on limestone,
Throats clear,
While the central heating hisses a
Chinese vowel
And Comrade Wu makes
A humming sound
Between her teeth,
And Comrade Lui watches the black-shod feet
Of his wife
Propel themselves like tiny boats
Beside his own
Forever
And beyond his own
Forever
Onto the dusty concrete of
Forever,
And Comrade Lui
Looks up into the creaking sunlight,
Groaning down the Peking street
Whose long gray walls
Stretch on and on
Forever between
Both sides.
I Saw a Chinese Lady …
I saw a Chinese lady with bound feet in the park,
Hobbling down a pale trail drenched in mimosa early in the day,
Eyes blank with dotage and reminiscence,
Feet like an unfinished drawing running off the page:
The dots of exclamation points beneath baggy trousers,
Domino fetish feet, white-socked and black-shod Golden Lilies,
Anachronism of anachronisms, recalling History like an out-dated penny,
No longer acceptable as the coin of the realm
But cherished as a souvenir of a past not to be denied
And given to children to play with.
Smiling Mao
Smiling Mao, Mao smiling
Mao smiling Mao and Mao
smiling smiling Mao smiling
Thoughts having become
The center of the world,
Thoughts having become
The only thoughts worth
Thinking as thoughts,
Thoughts thought
As thoughts have
Never been thought before,
Held as thoughts have
Never been held before,
As a guard and a bandage, as
A production report and
A prayer, as a love song
And a children’s chant,
Thoughts added up
In billions,
Eight hundred million
Thoughts based on
The same thoughts make
A multitude of thoughts,
A cosmic force
To be reckoned with,
With some
Thoughts of our own.
Smiling Mao, Mao smiling
Mao smiling Mao and Mao
smiling smiling Mao smiling
Sneaking Around Corners
Sneaking around corners
As noncommittal as a Chinese smile,
A Peking wall slides by bland in neutral gray,
Punctuated by a jade green door like
A parenthesis in a long paragraph.
Shanghai
Tender-faced soldiers walking hand in hand
And Girls Afraid to Look in Their Mirrors
Soft-Shell Crabs Steaming
Soft-shell crabs
Steaming in woven baskets over hot coals,
Smells threading in and out of consciousness, bringing
Saliva to the mouths,
Blue-quilted workers,
Swaying in the breeze like April irises,
Scraps of conversation rise on
Sinuating heat like kites lingering over
Stalls on Lui Li Chen Street, and the
Scented song of the vendor
Sighs on in the
Soft evening of
A Peking
Spring.
Mao Waved To The People
Mao waved to the People,
That curious ripple from
Little finger to
Index finger
And back again,
And
The People
Wav
ed
Back.
Tchaï
Chinese chrysanthemums
The flower of my heart
Orderly unfolding of petals
That represents perfection
Confucius says counting them is
An exercise in meditation
But I prefer to brew them for tchaï
Hangchow
White pigeon pairs
Your bodies barely touch
Dark sleek heads bent
Converged into ironed starched shirts
Of ruffled feathers
As spring hovers round you like silk drapery
Kissing and cooing with sweet stirrings of summer
White pigeon pairs
Your bodies barely touch
As you whisper with chaste lips
What? Comrade?
While the Western Lake dreams on
Like a curse and bourgeois love,
That fanatic’s joke lurches by.
Tai Lake Stone
The shape of Dignity
Raised to Art on Ming Wings
Gliding in and out of centuries
Like the Empress Wu’s stone ship
Staring like some Mongolian watchdog
Sent to sic the barbarians
Chinese Seal
ETERNITY PRESSED
INTO BLOOD RED LEAD
WITHOUT LETTING GO
Mongolian Dog
Mongolian tradition holds
That people are reincarnated
From the canine.
You must
Never strike a dog
Because you never know
If he is going to come back
As your kid
Or your dad
As people move to cities and
Mongolia opens to the world,
Dogs are losing
Their once vital role
As life’s shepherds.
Many abandoned dogs
Go wild and breed with wolves
Creating smarter
More cunning, mongrels
Wolves that no longer
Fear humans
As they once did
I should know
My future grandson just
Bit me
—Genghis Kahn
Letter From Mongolia
Saffron light
Filtered down through the navel of this
Brown felt womb.
Squatting in this Mongolian Yurt,
In this Mongolian place
Whose very name means
The end of the world,
The taste of cosmos on my lips:
Rancid butter, milk, and tea.
Unknown tongues ricochet off soft
Multicolored carpets,
Blending into God knows
What hyper-metrical of sounds,
And God knows how my sparse and angular
English weaves in and out
Of this labyrinth,
Emerging from the other side
Only to make the return journey
Like some desperate commuter
Stuck forever in the Lincoln Tunnel,
Everytime a Knot Is Undone, a God Is Released Page 8