But follow him along the mountainside?
So with sweet Minette loping alongside—
She preferred him above the other males—
They coursed the shadowed gulches and the ridge,
And passed the outer borders of the ranch.
A vigilant policeman with a snooper
Doubtless picked out a flight of crimson shades;
But one sheep in wolf’s clothing missed his eye.
“Sheep?” sings out Beatrice, and her voice catches
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In that infectious, wanton laugh of hers;
“I think my sister married a coyote.
Promise to teach me to pee standing up.
But look, you need a drink.” She fetches out
On a thick silver tray a stoneware bottle,
Eye-white, painted with bright blue cocks and hens,
Black spots and crosses under the glaze,
And pours into two little matching cups
A clear fluid unviscous as the air,
Smelling of fire and earth and prickly pears.
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She halves a lemon with a knife and sets
A bowl of rocksalt where her friend can reach it;
Then has a thought and brings in some tortillas.
“We’ll burn the documents tonight. The polizei
Will show up in the morning, not till then.
CBS says they’re trying Freya too,
As one of the directors. Mother wants
To get us all, I think, specially me,
And use the children to make us cry uncle.
Wolf and Irene went to sleep like angels
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By the way; Irene asked for you.”
The poem turns to Sumikami, the nurse of Wolf and Irene, the twin children of Charlie and Freya. We follow Sumikami’s past life as the daughter of a Vietnamese prostitute and a black U.S. marine: her coming to Japan, her work as a dancer and geisha, and her love for an Australian priest; we learn of her son Tripitaka, and of how mother and son contracted from the father the AIDS virus; of their discovery by Beatrice and their healing by the bioengineers of the Van Riebecks; of Tripitaka’s subsequent deformity.
Scene iv:
Sumikami
Picture two children asleep in wooden beds,
Who when awake will not be separated
And spurn the offer of rooms of their own
And dream in series and in parallel
Like clouds of a likeness on a summer’s day
That grow and pucker into matching shapes
Marked against blue sky; but this dark zenith
Is the noon of night; the white clouds, soul slime.
Twins, like peace and war, like the yolk and white,
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Wolf and Irene know by mirror-light
That persons are enacted and not given;
For all their differences have been achieved
There at the white heart of their sympathy,
And selfsame self is not itself the same.
Between their childhot nests in the night light
It seems a heap of crumpled silk has just
Been thrown upon a chair, to take a shape
Lovely, confused, almost recognizable,
Indigo, goldthread, pinkshot as a dream;
20
Seen, as the night eye dilates, to be not
A silken thing alone, but a small woman,
Fallen asleep clothed, a hand by each cheek
Of her little ones, its warm peachblond glow.
This lady is the one who turned away,
Shyly, when the poet’s scrutiny
Passed with its coarse summations over her;
Now we may take advantage of her sleep
And stare into her seamless face, and taste
The bitter cordial of her history.
30
Chui Su was born in 1968.
Her mother was a little Saigon whore
Of Chinese ancestry, a devout Buddhist;
The father was a black U.S. marine
Who went back home after his tour of duty;
And thus Chui Su had no family name.
When Saigon fell they wandered in the streets,
Then cast their luck in with the boat people.
The mother drowned in the South China Sea;
A Kyushu trawler found the little girl.
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They saw the letter pinned to her cheong sam;
The captain knew a geisha house in Tokyo,
Asked the good ladies to look after her.
The geisha training took; she learned to sing,
And play the hollow Koto and the flute;
And set a spray of flowers and a twig
So as to form an ancient space of light
Speaking of Murasaki and her shining prince
And snow or peach blossom blown in from those
Gold Heian centuries of love and war;
50
And she could dance that slow sweet dance of pain
The little mermaid dances in the tales
The West tells of the same archetype.
But like her mother she remained devout,
Seeking the hard Zen of the floating world;
And the girls nicknamed her Sumikami
After the goddess of all tender mercies,
And the name stuck, for it belonged to her.
Her father’s genes showed only faintest traces,
But for a creamier richness in the skin,
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A Khmer fullness of the flattened lips,
A darker timbre in the voice that matched
Well the long strings of the great Chinese Chen—
A life lived in the ecstasy of service,
The honor of a self stretched down to zero,
Perfection of subordinated will
So that pure being blossoms from the stillness
And the least treeleaf brings enlightenment.
Such as is our happiness, she was happy;
But in her forties all was overthrown.
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A westerner came to the geisha house,
And the calm lady Sumikami lost
Her heart like any Madam Butterfly;
She could know nothing of this tortured man
But that she loved him, she would die for him.
He was a Catholic priest, Australian;
Had found, with horror of his naked soul,
Desire boiling out of his control
When he beheld the stripped boys of his school;
Had sought out brutal men to slake his pangs.
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Here for a private school symposium,
He’d tried in desperation to forget
The greater sin of Sodom in this lesser;
He did not know he carried a disease
As horrible as his imaginings:
Acquired immune deficiency syndrome.
The body is a seven-gated city,
A mystical community of lives;
And all its members are as sister twins
Or duteous bees devoted to one god;
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And where the law of charity enjoins us
To take the battered stranger for our own,
The lives we’re made of must acknowledge none
To be their neighbor but their sisterhood—
Unless in the great sanctuaries of
The testes and the claustral ovaries
The gene is stripped for its divine defiling
In the cave temple of the uterus;
And something halfway cancerous is born,
The shaman of the newer dispensation;
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This Dionysus must be hidden from
The rage of our herodic soldiery,
The macrophages, by the mediation
Of the all-mothering placenta.
But if the alchemy that coats the sperm
To guard it from t
he poisons of the womb
Be allied with that subtle herpetoid,
The retrovirus, then the warriors
That guard the little city of a woman
Cast down their weapons in despair and die.
110
Just so did Sumikami fall, conceive,
And carry from her act of ill compassion
Two gifts: a sickness and an only son.
Her former life was over. In her frenzy
When the failed priest left her she cared little
How the great blots of Kaposi’s Sarcoma
Merged and spread upon her beautiful limbs;
Her geisha sisters thought her loss of weight
Was grief and loss of appetite, but soon
The small dropsy of the unborn showed
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And the required examination told
The doctors of that other incubus.
Now Sumikami heard a whisper from
Her womb, a distinct voice from one who might,
In adult life, have been a saint, but had,
Because of the great press of worldly karma,
Delayed that glory to another life:
One who, troubled, eager and perfect, would,
Despite coming sorrow, nevertheless
Wish fiercely to be born and be alive.
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It seemed to bid her to a nunnery.
Winter had come, and Sumikami knew
The geishas would not let her go alone.
One frosty afternoon she slipped away;
The cold vinyl of the Nissan taxi
Made her to shiver, hug her coarse silk bag;
She took the cheapest train west to Kyoto
Where she remembered from a girlhood visit
The women’s temple shrine of Jakko-in.
That evening Sumikami trudged the way
140
Up the long slope by the bamboo barrens,
Where a light snow lay upon the pine boughs
That smelt of resin when it powdered down.
A red sun shone across the frosty levels
And caught the last bloodvessel crimson leaves
Of a dwarf maple strangled with a vine;
And every bamboo leaf ached with the snow.
She almost fainted on the frozen grass;
Her head felt huge and far away with fever.
It was dead still. The sun touched the horizon.
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The sky, a darkening pinkish brown, turned green.
And now although the world lay motionless
A lake of warmer air filled up the valley;
She felt a lightness carry all her limbs
As if she’d stepped into a mineral bath,
And finding strength, unlatched the bamboo gate
And passed into the holy Jakko-in.
The Jakko-in is not like other temples
With their huge end gables and smell of power,
Their almost Indonesian posts and beams
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Bespeaking male submission to a god;
The Jakko-in is small and clean and soft
Like a well-kept family farm, subdued
And feminine; but the Amida Buddha
Loves to dwell here as in his favorite room;
And Lady Kuniko the Reverend Mother
Was not solicitous and not severe
But simply practical, like a ward nurse,
With this strange impressive urban woman:
Thus is perhaps the Zen of adjectives.
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They put her in the guest room by the temple.
That night she first woke when a hurrying nun
Came in on tiptoe with a small iron stove
And set it deftly by her sleeping recess.
A colder air had come down in the night
From the high regions about Fuji-san.
The little bed of coals glowed all that night
And gave a pleasant smell of sandalwood.
She woke again, as happy as a girl,
Thinking she was Chui-Su again and in
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Her mother’s studio in old Saigon.
Quite wide awake and hungry, she got up;
Some salt or sweet or protein need the child
Demanded like a normal pregnancy
Drew her towards the shoji screen, and there
The wise sister who knew more of these things
Than properly she should, had set a dish
Of ripe persimmons and a bowl of rice;
The little flask alongside, it turned out,
Contained a salt fish soup, which was delicious.
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The mother, satisfied, and without thought,
Slid the rice paper door ajar and peeped
Into the dim interior of the temple.
It smelt of clean cloth and of incense, where
A flame burned motionless within its lamp;
Between eight Bodhisatvas was a lotus
Carved of dark wood against a whitish screen,
And on the lotus stood a simple Buddha
Whose gilding had worn off in several places;
At first he seemed a little sleepy man
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Run comfortably to fat, but then she saw
In the mild cheeks and the untroubled brow,
And the plump hands that held nothing at all,
A divine peace quite as fantastical
As any war of dragons and of myths.
It seemed to Sumikami that the child
In her womb was still and comfortable
As he had not been for days; it was the food,
She thought, smiling to herself in the presence
Of the Buddha, who did not take advantage
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Of this smile, this womanly reflection.
But from that time there came remission of
The symptoms of the courtesan’s disease;
This was a sort of miracle if one
Skilled in the virus had recorded it.
But still the small snake curled within her blood,
As if to say nothing is ever pure;
And the child too would carry in his tears,
His innocent spittle, and, when he was grown,
The flowery spilling of his manhood, that
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Embodiment of the world angel’s evil.
But this is to step roughly through the years;
Now Sumikami knows, as many come
To know, the sweetness of eternity;
Thaw follows thaw into the days of flowers;
The cherry tree outside her mean apartment
In an untidy precinct of Tokyo
Turns, five o’clock one morning, from a mask
Of black lace occluding the pure stars,
To a blue constellation against blue,
230
To a black grating full of crimson coals
As the sun strikes it through the reddening haze,
To a wind tossed snowstorm, the character
That stands for all things passing, thus eternal
In the old language of the Nihhon poets;
There is a smell of nutmeg and of girls;
And then she feels the welcome pains and cries
Out to be taken to the hospital.
But her profession’s gone; her savings too
In those ecstatic months of idleness;
240
And as all human knowledge of perfection
Is marked by brevity and demands for payment
So Sumikami must come back from heaven
Into the anxious world of the temp sec,
The music tutor for the ungifted child,
Selling refinement with her flower arrangements,
And the sweet breath of soul in dancing lessons.
But the child grew up fine as a white fire.
He had the dark skin of his grandfather
But shaded into Chi
nese bronze or peach;
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His features were the purest oriental,
And girlish, with amazing gray-blue eyes;
His hair was the white blond of his priest father.
This is a tale of half-breeds, of the search
Our species has embarked on for its center,
The fully human woman, man, and child;
Of how we may build back out of the shattered
Fragments of the races, that bright body
Prophecy promised and our fear denied:
The priest dancer of our original,
260
The redskin Adam that has never been.
And Sumikami named him Tripitaka
After the holy man who was the friend
Of Monkey the trickster god, with whose help
He carried through the mountains of enchantment
Out of the magic land of India
The sacred scriptures speaking of lord Buddha.
She told him that his father was a saint
Who’d worked among the aborigines
And died a martyr in the poor folks’ service.
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And Tripitaka (Tak to his little friends)
Grew up so fiercely loyal to his father
That he believed himself Australian,
Vowed that he’d claim his country back one day.
Tak was an athlete, and at school was picked
As a trainee for the Olympic Games.
By this time, though the freedom of research
Daily drew in as Ecotheists gained
Power and position in the legislatures,
Most strains of AIDS had been eliminated;
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Yet, despite Sumikami’s strictest fasts,
Her sharp economies concealed from Tak,
Her visits to expensive specialists,
The virus clung in Tripitaka’s blood;
And sometimes the lymph glands would be engorged
And the boy’s martial arts training deferred.
He was eighteen in 2029,
Had won the youth pentathlon twice already,
Had studied under Sensei Nishiyama
The old Karate style of Shotokan,
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And earned the honor of the fourth degree,
When his condition worsened and he lay
More and more often in a subtle fever.
Now Sumikami prayed and wept and begged
The Buddha’s mercy that He should take her
And not the boy. Tak had a girl whose name
Was Sachiko, who always wondered why
In these modern days Tak should be so strange
And formal as the ancient Japanese:
Unlike the other boys, he never tried
300
To press on her his physical desire;
Genesis: An Epic Poem of the Terraforming of Mars Page 7