Night Sky with Exit Wounds
Page 5
Sextant & compass. Let’s call this autumn
where my father sits in a $40 motel
outside Fresno, rattling from the whiskey
again. His fingers blurred
like a photograph. Marvin on the stereo
pleading brother, brother. & how
could I have known, that by pressing
this pen to paper, I was touching us
back from extinction? That we were more
than black ink on the bone
-white backs of angels facedown
in the blazing orchard. Ink poured
into the shape of a woman’s calf. A woman
I could go back & erase & erase
but I won’t. I won’t tell you how
the mouth will never be honest
as its teeth. How this
bread, daily broken, dipped
in honey—& lifted
with exodus tongues, like any other
lie—is only true as your trust
in hunger. How my father, all famine
& fissure, will wake at 4 a.m.
in a windowless room & not remember
his legs. Go head, baby, he will say, put yor han
on mai bak, because he will believe
I am really there, that his son
has been standing behind him all
these years. Put yor hans on mai showduh,
he will say to the cigarette smoke swirling
into the ghost of a boy, Now flap. Yeah, lye dat, baby.
Flap lye yu waving gootbai. See?
I telling yu... I telling yu. Yor daddy?
He fly.
Odysseus Redux
He entered my room like a shepherd
stepping out of a Caravaggio.
All that remains of the sentence
is a line
of black hair stranded
at my feet.
Back from the wind, he called to me
with a mouthful of crickets—
smoke & jasmine rising
from his hair. I waited
for the night to wane
into decades—before reaching
for his hands. Then we danced
without knowing it: my shadow
deepening his on the shag.
Outside, the sun kept rising.
One of its red petals fell
through the window—& caught
on his tongue. I tried
to pluck it out
but was stopped
by my own face, the mirror,
its cracking, the crickets, every syllable
spilling through.
Logophobia
Afterward, I woke
into the red dark
to write
gia đình
on this yellow pad.
Looking through the letters
I can see
into the earth
below, the blue blur
of bones.
Quickly—
I drill the ink
into a period.
The deepest hole,
where the bullet,
after piercing
my father’s back,
has come
to rest.
Quickly—I climb
inside.
I enter
my life
the way words
entered me—
by falling
through
the silence
of this wide
open mouth
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red trip wire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty out of.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer
& failing. Ocean. Ocean—
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.
Devotion
Instead, the year begins
with my knees
scraping hardwood,
another man leaving
into my throat. Fresh snow
crackling on the window,
each flake a letter
from an alphabet
I’ve shut out for good.
Because the difference
between prayer & mercy
is how you move
the tongue. I press mine
to the navel’s familiar
whorl, molasses threads
descending toward
devotion. & there’s nothing
more holy than holding
a man’s heartbeat between
your teeth, sharpened
with too much
air. This mouth the last
entry into January, silenced
with fresh snow crackling
on the window.
& so what—if my feathers
are burning. I
never asked for flight.
Only to feel
this fully, this
entire, the way snow
touches bare skin—& is,
suddenly, snow
no longer.
Notes
The book’s epigraph is from Bei Dao’s “Untitled,” translated by Eliot Weinberger and Iona Man-Cheong.
“Threshold” borrows and alters a phrase from Carl Phillips’s “Parable.”
“Aubade with Burning City” borrows lyrics from “White Christmas,” a song written by Irving Berlin.
The epigraph for “Immigrant Haibun” is from Edmond Jabès’s The Book of Questions, translated by Rosemarie Waldrop.
“The Gift” is after Li-Young Lee
The title “Always & Forever” is also the name of my father’s favorite song, as performed by Luther Vandross.
“Anaphora as Coping Mechanism” is for L.D.P.
The title “Queen Under The Hill” is from Robert Duncan’s poem “Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow.” The poem borrows and alters language from Eduardo Corral’s poem “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”
“Notebook Fragments” borrows a phrase from Sandra Lim’s “The Dark World”; Nguyễn Chí Thiện was a Vietnamese dissident poet who spent a total of twenty-seven years in prison for his writings. While incarcerated, with no pen and paper, he composed and committed his poems to memory.
The title “Someday I’
ll Love Ocean Vuong” is after Frank O’Hara and Roger Reeves.
“Devotion” is for Peter Bienkowski.
Also by Ocean Vuong
No
Burnings
Acknowledgments
A pot of steaming jasmine tea for the editors of the publications in which some of these poems have appeared, sometimes in different forms:
The American Poetry Review, Assaracus, Beloit Poetry Journal, BODY Literature, Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Court Green, Crab Orchard Review, Cream City Review, Dossier, Drunken Boat, Eleven Eleven, Gulf Coast, Linebreak, Narrative, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Normal School, PANK, Passages North, Pleiades, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Poetry Ireland, The Poetry Review, Quarterly West, South Dakota Review, Southern Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and Verse Daily.
“Eurydice” was reprinted in The Dead Animal Handbook (2015); “Ode to Masturbation” was reprinted in Longish Poems (2015); “Always & Forever,” “Daily Bread,” “Prayer for the Newly Damned,” and “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” were reprinted in The BreakBeat Poets (2015); “Deto(nation),” “Eurydice,” “Homewrecker,” and “Telemachus” were reprinted in Poets On Growth (2015); “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” was reprinted in the Pushcart Prize (2014); “Anaphora as Coping Mechanism” was reprinted in Best New Poets 2014; “Telemachus” was the winner of the 2013 Chad Walsh Prize from Beloit Poetry Journal; “Prayer for the Newly Damned” was a winner of the 2012 Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets from the American Poetry Review.
I am grateful to the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Elizabeth George Foundation, the Poetry Foundation, Poets House, and the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, for time and support.
Thank you to Copper Canyon Press for believing.
Thank you to my dear friends, teachers, and edotprs for helping me.
Thank you, Peter, for Peter.
Copyright 2016 by Ocean Vuong
All rights reserved
Cover art courtesy of the author
ISBN: 978-1-55659-495-3
eISBN: 978-1-61932-156-4
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Ocean Vuong, Night Sky with Exit Wounds
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