to the right gate. She thanked me. She said
goodbye, see you again. “Joy kin.”
She did not look back. Good.
Gotta go, things to do, people
to meet, places to be.
CITY
I betook
myself to Xi’an. Like everyone,
I’m leaving village for city. But a city
so old and deep in-country, it has a chance
not to be the same global city
as every city. Xi’an means West Peace,
and was the capital during 4 eras, not Sung.
I stood at the bottom of the gray rock wall
of the walled city, looked up its slope,
looked to the curved sides, could not get
a sense of the whole layout. More solid
than Long Wall. A granite bowl banks
the earth around (parts of?) the city. I stood
on top of the wall, walked the boulevard
paved with bricks. I enjoyed spaciousness,
few walkers that day, few bicyclists.
At the ramparts on one side, I looked down
at ponds and moats. On the other side, sky-
scrapers, like a mirage city, much higher
than the walls. Relics of military defense,
walls are no barrier to attack, no
barrier to in-migration, never have been.
Xi’an, like the dusty villages, pushes out of
earth, and earth pulls it down into earth.
Build upward, towers, skyscrapers,
pagodas. Dig out of engulfing earth.
The air is dark. Everyone coughs.
Cover the kids’ faces with gauzy scarves.
It’s not just the cars. It’s the wind
blowing sand into this city at the south-
easternmost edge of the Gobi desert.
The body of sand is shifting over eastward,
and uncovering rock ground. Down in the street,
though dirt gray (this day won’t count
as blue-sky day either), glass
and steel shine through. Cities are full
of mirrors. My whole time in the villages, I
did not see a mirror. I had not looked
at my image. Village people live so close
together—everyone sees everyone every
day—they know how attractive or unattractive
they are. Now the way I look
appears to me, here, there, in windows, on chrome,
in mirrors in markets and bathrooms. I have changed.
I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,
scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines
crisscross and zigzag my face.
My eyes. I am looking into eyes
whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown.
Wind and time are blowing me out.
The old women around me are vivid and loud.
Their hair is black. They’re beggars, soliciting
in a group outside the temple, selling
incense and matches, but don’t care whether
you buy or not. They’re out of the house enjoying
ladies’ company. A lone gray woman is
sitting on the curb by the crosswalk.
She’s begging, not selling anything;
begging is against the law. A policeman
and a cadre woman in charge of the street talk
to her for a long time. The cop kneels
to talk to her. She does not reply. I think
he’s trying to convince her to cease begging,
to get up and move on. The cadre
woman, an old woman too, is not
giving her a scolding. They’re treating her nicely,
speaking softly, secretively. They don’t want
to make a scene on the street, don’t want
this conturbation to be happening. Homeless old
beggar women? None such. I
keep watching. They won’t hurt her as long
as the American tourist watches. After quite
a while, I have more interesting sights
to see, and leave. When I come back
to that street corner, she’s gone. Why
is it that old women are China’s refuse,
and men, war veterans, America’s? When the society
is supposed to be honoring grandmothers, and admiring
macho men? “Do not let mother and father go
hungry; feed them meat from the flesh of your arm.”
Walking past the incense ladies, all
acting important, I go inside the temple.
Up on platforms, the fortune-tellers,
all men, perform their specialties—
coins, yarrow, the I Ching, magic
birds, turtle shells. They read palms,
read the loops and whorls and arches on
fingerprints, read words on sticks of
bamboo, read faces and freckles
and bumps on heads. I buy a fortune.
of little cages. The magic man slides
open the door. Out hops a java
finch. It picks up a card in its diamond
beak: the Woman Warrior, charging forth
on her white horse, wielding her double broadswords.
“You are brave, you will live a long life.”
But he must tell everyone: You’ll live long.
Never death. Never suicide. The java finch
eats a reward of seeds, and hops back
into its cage. In Xi’an, there are drum
towers and bell towers, and wild goose
towers. Chinese contrary, the Small
Wild Goose is 13 stories
high; the Big Wild Goose, 7.
A poet was once seen riding a wild goose,
flying over the city, and away. All
had been golden, the goose, the poet, his robes,
the towers. The eyewitnesses watched until
they saw what seemed to be a golden insect
vanish into the sky. I give incense
and make slow bows at Big Wild Goose,
that I should write well, like Du Fu
and Li Bai, who had both come here,
and written well. That my writing give life,
to whomever I write about, as Shakespeare
promised. Chinese are mad for long life.
Quest and wish for time, more time,
more, yet more. Carve poems and decrees
on rocks. Erect forests of steles. 500
pyramids to safeguard the emperors
inside them, and their armies, and horses,
acrobats, and musicians, always. I myself
have tasted longlife medicine—bitter.
My mother gave it to us. Rabbit-in-the-Moon—
my father—mixes the elixir for immortality.
But I have seen poets training in impermanence.
Early in the paved city, when dew beads
the marble and concrete, the poets write with water.
He or she stands quietly holding
the tall brush, like a lance, like a shuffleboard
paddle, like a pole vault pole. Then touches
the writing end—a cloth-wrapped mallet, not a mop—
down upon the hard ground, the page.
Legs spread, the poet, straddling the coming words,
sweeps downward stroke to the left, upward
stroke to the right, dabs quick dots,
pulls horizontal lines, pulls vertical
lines, flips a sharp-curve tail.
Gets to the end before the beginning dries.
Onlookers, readers, and fellow poets
leaning on their own writing poles, read
aloud the transpiring words, one
word, next word, then the whole
fleeting poem, exclaim over it, criticize it,
memorize i
t, sing it once more as the sun
dries it up. They stand around the spot
where the poem had been, don’t step on it,
and discuss the writing of it, the idea of it,
the prosody of it with its creator. The sun rises,
time to wet the brushes in the water bucket.
Dip again and again, and write long
long lines. No corrections! No
reworking! One poet writes,
another poet writes—in answer!
I should’ve asked to borrow a writing pole,
and drawn an enso as big a circle as I
could make in one wet swoop all
the way around myself, me the center.
In Japanese Zen, on your 60th birthday,
you can draw a perfect circle. However
it arcs or squiggles, however black or faint,
large or small, one swoop or 2
discontinuous strokes—perfect.
You’ve brought to the making of it your lifetime
of ability. My perfect reader would know to read
my enso’s journey from Asia to America back
to Asia, from classical times to modern, to New Age.
In the park of formal gardens, the martial artists—
practitioners of the many ways of kung fu,
and disco, women with fans, women with the long
ribbon, swordswomen, swordsmen—are moving
and dancing to the rhythms of his own discipline,
her own discipline. Solitaries, too, claim
their places—the top of the round bridge,
the island of grass, the room behind a curtain
of weeping willow. Free to make whatever
expressions you like. Dance like nobody else.
I join this group and that one, get easily
into step, not worried, in sync,
out of sync, nobody’s looking at me.
I’m part of the Chinese crowd. I stand
in first-position chi kung, and watch
the teacher direct her advanced students, who
have their backs to her. She waves her hands,
and they in unison leap into the air.
Waw! Wei! She’s lifting, orchestrating
their jumps with chi. Her chi is mighty;
she is 90 years old. Teacher
walks up to me; she studies me.
I feel warmth from her eyes on my skin.
She adjusts my hands to make paws like
an upright-standing squirrel or bear.
She runs her hand straight down the center
of my chest. I feel power shoot
into me, heating my core, glowing. She’d
given me some of her chi, charged me with chi.
Chi is real; I am strengthened to this day.
“You stand for one hour,” she says.
I stand for one hour. Marveling, there is such
a thing as chi. Yin wind, yang
wind, real. Life, love, soul,
good. And there are people who can
control it and transmit it, and teach you how
to acquire chi, and how to use it. At the end
of my hour, Teacher comes to check on me.
Her eyes scan me, land on my hair.
“Keep working on your chi kung;
your hair will turn black.” Her hair
is jet-black. She doesn’t like
white hair. I won’t work chi kung
to change my hair; I want to change the world.
My body and mind taking on forms that
Chinese have been configuring for 4,000
years, my 12 meridians linking up
with the globe’s 360, energy will round
the globe, and heal the bombed-up world.
I’m not alone; people here and people who’ve
migrated everywhere are doing this work of
influencing wind and water (feng shui).
We continue the life of the world. Live,
live, live, live.
In Xi’an,
there’s a museum like the museum I made
as a kid for my collections, strange things
I picked up along the railroad tracks,
and in the slough, and in the cash register.
Deer hoof, a baby bat, counterfeit
money, fool’s gold. Behind dusty
glass, there lay the arrow with nock-whistle
that I’d invented for the barbarians who
played the reed pipe. The poet’s imagination
flies true. It works, it hit on the actual.
It can make up a thing that will
materialize, in China, in Time, the past, the future.
So, at the walled city of West Peace,
I come to the start of the Silk Road, which forks.
Southwest, the way Tripitaka Tang
and Monkey Sun Wu Kong went questing,
betakes you to India. Northwest, you’d end
up in Afghanistan, then Iran, then Uruk,
home of Gilgamesh—Iraq. Peace groups
invite me to these places, but I turn them down.
I don’t want my heart to break.
Fa Mook Lan would go. She’d join
the army of whichever side held her family
hostage. She’d win battles, and receive
honorable discharge home, though the 1,000
years war is not done. Now
I know: She killed herself.
She had P.T.S.D.; her soldier’s heart broke,
and she fell upon her sword. This month,
May 2009, more American soldiers died by
their own hand than killed by Iraqis and Al Qaeda.
So far this year, 62 suicides,
more than half of them National Guard;
138 in 2008. I have no words of consolation.
Wittman, son, brother, imaginary friend,
I need you. Help me again. Go
up Sky Mountain. Here, I’ll
unwind for you a ribbon of rainbow silk
scrolling into golden desert. Walk
upon it with men in burnooses and women in burkas,
colors blowing and flapping, and camels swaying
and swinging bells, heading toward cities
and mirages of cities. The oasis that gives you
haven is Basra, the air station and naval
base. Basra, home of Sinbad the Sailor,
and before that, the Garden of Eden.
Please stand on a roadside, and hold
the Bell of Peace, a golden bowl, on
your proffering hand, and think this thought:
“Body, speech, and mind in perfect oneness,
I send my heart along with the sound of this bell.
May all the hearers awaken from forgetfulness,
and transcend the path of anxiety and sorrow.”
Touch bell stick to bell, warming it,
breathe in, breathe out, then make one
sure stroke. The ring changes the air.
The ring rings through din. The din
stills. The ring makes silence all
around, all around. Explosions cease.
Bombardment ends. Combatants
stop to enjoy the sound of Buddha’s voice.
The ring gathers time into one moment
of peace. Which is torn by engine noise
from a light, white aircraft, like an insect,
a whitefly. A drone. A hunter-killer drone.
Yell at it, “Coward! Coward!” We are cowards,
killing without facing those we kill,
without giving our victims a chance at us.
Yell “Coward” up at the drone,
then turn toward the air base and yell
at it, “Coward! Coward! Coward! Coward!”
Your voice carries all the way to Virginia,
where the computer specialist is pressing the buttons.
He hear
s you, wakes up, stops warring.
HOME AGAIN
Thank you, Wittman. Now go
continue on the Silk Road all the way
to its other end, in Soglio, where Taña awaits you.
It’s Taña! My own dear wife.
Rush into each other’s arms. Home.
No rancor. No ambivalence.
“I saw you constantly. I saw you everywhere.”
True, blondes everywhere—Chinese
with yellow hair, natural and chemical—each
one startling—it’s Taña. My heart leapt.
My heart fell—it wasn’t you. “Welcome, Love.
Welcome back.” The red string holds.
Hand in hand, the dear forever married
walk through the piazza with the bell tower,
and into the snow-topped mountains, stand
for a time on the Soglio mesa, and breathe
the good air between sky and far-down
chestnut forests. Rilke, who walked here,
advised, Change your life. Then westward
home, where Mario, one and only son,
has met his one true love, Anh Lan.
Please, no arguing, live happily ever after.
A long time has passed since I began
the journey of this poem. Poetry, which makes
immortality and eternity, did not stop
time. In 4 years real time:
MY DEAD
John Mulligan
Grace Paley
Pat Haines
Aunt Wai Ying Chew Lam
John Gregory Dunne and Quintana Roo
Ralph Swentzell
Jade Snow Wong
Vera Fessler
Irene Takei Miura
Roger Long
Pham Tiến Duât
Roger Allsop
Carole Koda
Alyssa Merchant
John Griffin
Sandy Taylor
Ena Gibson
Stella Jue
Glenn Kawahara
Gene Frumkin
George Carlin
Guanfu Guo
Col. Kenneth En Yin Ching
Bob Winkley
Oakley Hall
Capitano
Marion Perkins
Kazuko Onodera
Laura Evelia Pérez-Arce Dávalos
Kristi Rudolph
Lawrence William Smith
Ardavan Daravan
Ian and Susan MacMillan
Michael Rossman
Auntie Nona Beamer
John Leonard
Eartha Kitt
Jim Houston
Mike Porcella
Ron Takaki
Eng Lay Dai Gwoo
Jerry Josephs
Naomi Gibson
Roy Colombe
Lucille Clifton
Dorothy Langley Hoge
Tom Pigford
Archie Spencer
Howard Zinn
Donovan Cummings
Henry Vallejo