Hindsight—never existed until August 3, 2015. Someone had painted over hindsight. But if you paint over something, it still exists. On some nights, while the children brush their teeth, I hide under their blankets and jump out when they return. I try to make myself as flat as possible, try not to move as if I have died. Every time, I run out of air. Every time, I realize I don’t want to die. Every time, I realize death doesn’t care what I want. Sometimes, a child screams, but most of the time, they see my shape or my foot and know I am alive. I wish I had known exactly when my mother would die. As in an appointment. Then I would have moved my feelings earlier. I wouldn’t have painted over her mouth. I wouldn’t have painted over my heart. Now that it’s over, I know the heart doesn’t really shatter, but I also can no longer feel it.
The Priest—died on August 3, 2015. As he died, he cursed. When the priest first started coming, he left a watermark on the door. As time passed, my mother’s door was riddled with bullets from his fist. He started sending me prayers with his eyes. I didn’t want his prayers. I had too many selves for God to save. None of my selves knew how to say sorry. None of my selves knew each other. I wonder if my mother took God in toward the end? The way she had once cared for her fifty bonsai plants each morning, snipping gently, adjusting tiny sprinklers, beckoning them with her breath. The bonsai barely responded, had never asked to be limited. She said the priest was weird, would look at her in a creepy way. As if he knew she was not a believer but a refugee. When she arrived in this country, they painted over her skin. Her fungal toes only looked like roots.
I put on a shirt,
put on a pair of work pants
because I will die.
How the snow falls to its death,
how snow is just dressed-up rain.
*
Where do they find hope?
Sometimes the city has pleats,
sometimes the body
rings with joy shaped like violets,
sometimes the night wind tingles.
The Car—it was difficult work to take away. It died on March 13, 2015. Before my mother died, my father studied for six months for the DMV test, as if it were an entrance exam to heaven. My mother found him old tests in Chinese. He sat at the table, hand to his head, mumbling, walking so many times to my mother’s chair a small river formed under him. 2. God suddenly cuts in front of you creating a hazard. Which of these actions should you take first? a) Honk and step on the brake firmly, b) Take your foot off the gas, c) Swerve into the lane next to you. Is there a choice d? Accelerate and run God over.
My Mother’s Favorite Potted Tree—died in 2016, a slow death. The day I looked up, the pink blossoms gone, the branches shabby opium pipes. The pot the only thing recognizable. I had moved the tree here and it had died too. My neighbor insisted it was still living as if insisting could make it bloom again. His parents were still alive so I let him believe. One morning, small black sprinklers in the pot. I had forgotten about the hope of others. I had forgotten about others. I only had one friend left—Death. That year, I quit my job. When I brushed my children’s hair, birds flew out from underneath. My mother would not have approved. I can see her face as I tell her the wrong story. As time passes, my memories of her are like a night animal racing across the roof. I know it is an animal, but I will never be able to see it or know when it will come again.
Similes—died on August 3, 2015. There was nothing like death, just death. Nothing like grief, just grief. How the shadow of a chain-link fence can look like a fish’s scales but never be. Once my mother called late at night because she was constipated. The streetlamps still looked like things with their long arched arms. I sat on her bed in the dark. The glow from the bathroom light still like everything. I filled and emptied the plastic sitz bath that looked like something. Her two elbows still able to make small bowls on her knees. I gave her instructions and said nothing more. If only words could represent thought in the way a microphone represents words.
Affection—died on November 12, 1978, the last picture I see of my mother’s arms around me. At the funeral, I never touched my sister. When the room was finally empty, she sat in the front row with her spouse. I watched his arm lift and fall onto her shoulder. When my spouse’s parents died, both times, he burst into tears, inextinguishable tears that quickly extinguished. The first time, he hugged me and not his family. The second time, he hugged no one. When the nurse called, she said, I’m sorry, but your mother passed away this morning. When I told my children, the three of us hugged in a circle, burst into tears. As if the tears were already there crying on their own and we, the newly bereaved, exploded into them. In the returning out of the tears, the first person I dissolves a little more each time.
Home—died sometime around 1960 when my mother left Taiwan. Home died again on August 3, 2015. Home’s fingertips trimmed off each time. New stubs became conscious, became heads of state, just shorter and fatter. Now home is a looking glass called Rose Hills Memorial Park. How far she has traveled from Beijing to Taiwan to New York to Pennsylvania to Michigan to California to Rose Hills. When a white writer has a character call another a squinty-eyed cunt, I search for my mother. I call her name but I can’t remember her voice. I think it is squinty. She would have said, Don’t listen to lao mei, we all end up in the same place. But where is that place? Are there doors there? Cattails? Now there are barbed wires in her throat, her words are stillbirth. All the new flat tombstones since my last visit, little stretchers on the lawn. I lie down next to her stone, close my eyes. I know many things now. Even with my eyes closed, I know a bird passes over me. In hangman, the body forms while it is being hung. As in, we grow as we are dying.
When a mother dies,
a house becomes a forest.
My children, children,
know that I am in the trees.
True love means you won’t find me.
*
My children, children,
remember to let me go,
delete my number,
save the number of the trees.
Remember, the lemons speak.
The Bees—268 million years old from the Philippines, passed away on April 26, 2217 in Nome, Alaska. The detaching icebergs crushed the bees who used to fly over conference rooms. Once I nearly died in a small plane with a CEO, CFO, and COO during their IPO. On the ground, the CEO glared at me, as if I had caused the storm. As if the yellow lights had come from my mind. As if the buzzing had come from my shaking. As if the lightning were a box I had tripped over. Maybe he was right. Maybe I had become estranged from a part of myself that wanted to stay alive. That wanted them to remain alive. In the same way I had become estranged from my mother forever, but not from her death.
Victoria Chang—died on August 3, 2015, the one who never used to weep when other people’s parents died. Now I ask questions, I bring glasses. I shake the trees in my dreams so I can tremble with others tomorrow. Only one of six siblings came to the funeral, the oldest uncle. A few called and cried or asked questions. This uncle said he knew something had happened because the morning my mother died he felt someone kick him, certain it was her. Now I know others found my mother difficult too. But she was not his mother. She was mine, all mine. Therefore anger toward her was mine. All mine. Anger after someone has died is a cake on a table, fully risen. A knife housed in glass.
Clothes—died on August 10, 2015. We stuffed them into lawn bags to donate. Shirt after shirt, button-down after button-down, dress after dress, limb after limb. A few leapt out to me like the flame from a nightmare, the kind of flame that almost seems human in its gestures. I kept those. I kept the hundreds of pencils. I am writing with a pencil from my mother’s drawer. It says Detroit Public Schools, where she taught. Each sentence fights me. Once we rolled her downstairs, played croquet and putt-putt golf. She sat and watched, her vacant eyes not seeing anything we saw. As if she were looking beyond us, beyond the sun. The days of August already made a certain way that she could see and we couldn�
�t. I left her in the sun too long. One child doing cartwheels on the grass as my mother looked on, wearing the white blouse with the small pink flowers swirling in a pattern. I kept the stare. I kept the flowers. And I donated the vacant shirt.
Guilt—never died on August 3, 2017. I hired a hit man to use a missile. But guilt still lies in a heap on my chest at night like a pile of frozen pigeons. Last month, my father fell again and I walked through him for the third time. They told me he was trying to run away and tripped. Another brain bleed. We moved him upstairs to memory care, as if strangers could somehow care for his memory. When I visited, no one could find him. We opened one door after another, the square-tipped smells of each person rushed out. We found him in someone else’s bed, hair buzzing. He handed me his glasses and said, Here’s my future. And all I could think was, What would my dead mother do? I went from room to room looking for her. All I found were dismembered shadows and bodies in C shapes, heads emptied out. I could hear all of the hearts beating in the dark. The problem was they all sounded the same. My own heart slowed. Guilt had turned into a heart too, mixed in the pile, breeding with all the other hearts.
The Ocean—died on August 21, 2017, when I didn’t jump from the ship. Instead, I dragged the door shut and pulled up the safety latch. The water in my body wanted to pour into the ocean and I imagined myself being washed by the water, my body separating into the droplets it always was. I could feel the salt on my neck for days. A woman I once knew leapt out of a window to her death. The difference was she was being chased. Some scientists say the ocean is warming. Some say the ocean has hypoxic areas with no oxygen. Even water has hierarchy. A child’s death is worse than a woman’s death unless the woman who died was the mother of the child and the only parent. If the woman who died was the mother of an adult, it is merely a part of life. If both mother and daughter die together, it is a shame. If a whole family dies, it is a catastrophe. What will we call a whole ocean’s death? Peace.
The Face—died on August 3, 2015, along with the body, particles of gray dust and small white bones. The face represents a personhood, the part we show to others the most. Could I identify my mother by her hands? Her feet? On the way to JFK, an old cemetery, headstones all different sizes, tilted. The headstone represents a person’s face, not in the same way a photo represents a face. A horn means something. It makes us look up and out at the train. When the train leaves, the tracks represent an absence but also imply a train once existed. Imply a hope, a return. Maybe there are no beginnings. Maybe nothing is an elegy, in the way rain from indoors is neither a beginning nor an end.
My children say no,
I say yes because I know.
I tell them they can.
But today, people were shot.
We walk into a blender.
*
Have you ever looked
so closely at a child’s face
that you could see God,
see the small hairs that you know
will lift with each new shooting?
IV
The canopy of civilisation is burnt out. The sky is dark as polished whale-bone. But there is a kindling in the sky whether of lamplight or of dawn. There is a stir of some sort—sparrows on plane trees somewhere chirping.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
America—died on February 14, 2018, and my dead mother doesn’t know. Since her death, America has died a series of small deaths, each one less precise than the next. My tears are now shaped like hooks but my heart is damp still. If it is lucky, it is in the middle of its beats. The unlucky dead children hold telegrams they must hand to a woman at a desk. The woman will collect their belongings and shadows. My dead mother asks each of these children if they know me, have seen me, how tall my children are now. They will tell her that they once lived in Florida, not California. She will see the child with the hole in his head. She will blow the dreams out of the hole like dust. I used to think death was a kind of anesthesia. Now I imagine long lines, my mother taking in all the children. I imagine her touching their hair. How she might tickle their knees to make them laugh. The dead hold the other half of our ticket. The dead are an image of wind. And when they comb their hair, our trees rustle.
I am ready to
admit I love my children.
To admit this is
to admit that they will die.
Die: no one knows this but words.
*
My children, children,
this poem will not end because
I am trying to
end this poem with hope hope hope,
see how the mouth stays open?
Notes
During the process of writing the Obit poems, I referenced Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and plucked out occasional words to spark my imagination.
Only after I had written “My Mother’s Lungs” did I read Blue Nights by Joan Didion and find that she had a similar thought about time change and death.
“I am a miner. The light burns blue.” is the first line of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Nick and the Candlestick.”
The phrase “Imagination is having to live in a dead person’s future” in the poem “The Blue Dress” is inspired by Richard Siken’s line “I live in someone else’s future” from his book War of the Foxes.
The phrase “in the way rain from indoors is neither a beginning nor an end” in the poem “The Face” is inspired by Brian Teare’s line “the way from indoors the sound of rain is both figure and ground” from his book The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven.
About the Author
Victoria Chang’s prior books are Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. Her children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, was illustrated by Marla Frazee and published by Beach Lane Books/Simon & Schuster. It was named a Notable Book by the New York Times. Her middle grade novel, Love, Love, was published by Sterling Publishing. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch’s low-residency MFA program.
Also by Victoria Chang
Barbie Chang
The Boss
Salvinia Molesta
Circle
Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation (editor)
Is Mommy? (for children, with Marla Frazee)
Love, Love (for children)
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the editors of the following journals in which many of the poems in this book appeared, often in earlier forms:
The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day: “The Blue Dress” and “My Father’s Frontal Lobe”
Adroit Journal: “My Mother’s Favorite Potted Tree,” “Similes,” and “Tomas Tranströmer”
AGNI: “Control” and “Optimism—died of monotony”
Alaska Quarterly Review: “Hindsight” and “Reason”
The American Poetry Review: “Empathy,” “Language—It wanted to live,” and “Time”
At Length: “Doctors—Dr. Lynch was supposed to,” “Friendships—died a slow death,” “Home—died sometime around 1960,” “Memory—It was a routine” (as “Money”), “Subject Matter,” and “Yesterday”
Blackbird: “Hope” “Victoria Chang—died unknowingly,” and “Voice Mail”
The Georgia Review: “Approval” “Language—died again,” “The Priest,” and “Victoria Chang—the one who never used to weep”
Guernica: “The Future”
Kenyon Review: “Affection” “The Clock,” “Clothes,” “Friendships—died once beloved,” “The Ocean,” and “Optimism—died a slow death into a pavement”
Michigan Quarterly Review: “Appetite—Once, in graduate school,” “Form—my children sleep,” “Hands,” “Memory—When I returned,” and “Secrets”
Mississippi Review: “Privacy” and “Tears”
N
arrative: “Appetite—died its final death,” “Doctors—Dr. Lynch, Dr. Chang, Dr. Mahoney,” “My Mother,” “Oxygen,” “The Situation,” and “Tankas,” published together as a group
New England Review: “Grief,” “Memory—The death was not sudden,” and “Music”
The Normal School: “The Head—died on August 3” and “Home—died on January 12, 2013”
Ploughshares: “Civility” and “Logic”
Poetry: “Caretakers” and “My Mother’s Teeth”
Poetry London: “Victoria Chang—died unwillingly” and “The Car”
A Public Space: “The Face”
Shenandoah: “Gait” and “My Mother’s Lungs”
Terrain.org: “America”
32 Poems: “The Doctors—died surrounded by” and “Obsession”
Tin House: “Form—After my mother died,” “Sadness,” and “Victoria Chang—died at the age of 41”
West Branch: “Ambition” and “Chair”
The Yale Review: “The Bees” and “Guilt”
Many sections of “I Am a Miner. The Light Burns Blue.” were published separately in different forms in journals such as AGNI, Blackbird, Cerise Press, Gulf Coast, Harvard Review, The Journal, Kenyon Review, Meridian, New England Review, Pleiades, The Southeast Review, and The Southern Review.
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