never learned the language. Couldn’t bear
the music. Heard at evening, the music—mele
and pila ho‘okani—would stay with me
all the night and into the next day.
It hurt my chest; my chest filled with tears.
Words for the feeling are: Regret. Minamina.
(Hun, said my mother. Hun, the sound of want.
Hun.) Hun the nation, lost. Hun
the land. Hun the beloved, loving people.
They’re dancing, feasting, talking-story, singing,
singing hello / goodbye. No sooner
hello than goodbye. Trees, fronds wave;
ocean waves. The time-blowing wind
smells of flowers and volcano. My son has given
me the reading that I never gave my father. Why
aren’t writers read by their own children?
The child doesn’t want to know that the parent
suffers, the parent is far, far away.
Joseph says, “Don’t write about me.”
“Okay. I won’t do it anymore.”
To read my father, I’d have to learn Chinese,
the most difficult of languages, each word a study.
A stroke off, a dot off, and you lose the word.
You get sent down for re-education. You lose your life.
My father wrote to me, poet to poet.
He replied to me. I had goaded
him: I’ll tell about you, you silent man.
I’ll suppose you. You speak up if I’ve got
you wrong. He answered me; he wrote
in the flyleaves and wide margins of the Chinese
editions of my books. I should’ve asked him to read
his poetry to me, and to say them in common speech.
I had had the time but not the nerve.
(Oh, but the true poet crosses eternal
distances. Perfect reader, come though 1,000
years from now. Poem can also reach
reader born 1,000 years before
the poem, wish it into being. Li Bai
and Du Fu, lucky sea turtles,
found each other within their lifetimes.
Oh, but these are hopeful superstitions
of Chinese time and Chinese poets.
I think non-poets live in the turning
and returning cosmos this way: An act
of love I do this morning saves a life
on a far future battlefield. And the surprising
love I feel that saves my life comes from
a person whose soul somehow corresponding
with my soul doing me a good deed 1,000
years ago.) Cold, gray October
day. I’ve built a fire, and sit by it.
The last fire. Wood fires are being
banned. Drinking the tea that cures everything.
It’s raining, drizzly enough, I need
not water the garden or go out to weed.
Do nothing all the perfect day.
A list of tasks for the rest of my working life:
Translate Father’s writing into English.
Publish fine press editions of the books
with his calligraphy in the margins and
my translations and my commentary
on his commentary, like the I Ching. Father had
a happy life; happy people are always
making something. Learn how to grow
old and leave life. How to leave
you who love me? Do so in story.
For the writer, doing something in fiction
is the same as doing it in life.
I can make the hero of my quondam novel,
Monkey King, Wittman Ah Sing,
observe Hindu tradition, and on his 5-times-12
birthday unguiltily leave his wife. Parents
dead, kids raised, the householder leaves
spouse and home, and goes into the mountains,
where his guru may be. In America, you can yourself
be the guru, be the wandering starets.
At his birthday picnic, Wittman Monkey wishes
for that freedom as he and the wind blow out
60-plus candles. Used to telling
his perfectly good wife his every thought,
he anti-proposes to her. “Taña, I love you. But.
I made a wish that we didn’t have to be married
anymore. I made a wish for China.
That I go to China on my own.” Taña—
beautiful and pretty as always, leaf shadows
rubbing the wrinkles alongside her blue eyes
and her smile, sun haloing her whitegold
hair—Taña lets Wittman’s bare words
hang in air. Go ahead, you Monkey.
Wish away. Tell away. Tell it
all away. Then she kicks ass—
“Here’s your one to grow on!”—then
gets quiet. She can be rid of him.
But first, have it out. “So, we’re not
going to be old lovers, and old artists
together till we die. After all our years
making up love, this thing, love,
peculiar to you and me, you quit,
incomplete. God damn it, Darling,
if your wife—I—were Chinese,
would she be your fit companion in China?”
“Hell, Sweetheart, if you were Chinese,
I wouldn’t’ve married you to begin with.
I spurned the titas for you.” Forsaking the sisters.
All my sisters-of-color. O, what
a romance of youth was ours, mating, integrating,
anti-anti-miscegenating. “Bad
Monkey. You married me as a politcal act.”
“No, Honey Lamb, uh uh.
An act of artists—the creating of you-and-me.”
Married so long, forgot how to declare I.
I want Time. I want China.
Married white because whites good at everything.
Everything here. Go, live Chinese,
gladly old. America, can’t get old,
no place for the old. China, there be
Immortalists. Time moves slower in China.
They love the old in China. No verb
tenses in Chinese, present tense
grammar, always. Time doesn’t pass
for speakers of such language. And the poets make
time go backward, write stroke by stroke,
erase one month of age with every poem.
Tuesday, I cried—in public,
a Chinese woman wailing to the streets—
over the headline: LIBBY FINGERS CHENEY.
I gloated, but suddenly stopped moving, and wept.
The stupid, the greedy, the cruel, the unfair have taken
over the world. How embarrassing, people asking,
“What’s wrong?” and having to answer, “Cheney.
Rumsfeld. Rove. Halliburton. Bush.” The liars.
The killers. Taking over the world. Aging,
I don’t cry for the personal anymore,
only for the political. Today’s news photo:
A 10-year-old boy—his name is
Ali Nasir Jabur—covers his eyes
with his hands. He hunkers in the truck bed
next to the long blanket-wrapped bodies of
his sister, 2 brothers, mother, and father.
A man’s bare feet stick out from a blanket
that has been taped around the ankles.
I see this picture, I don’t want to live.
I’ve seen the faces of beaten, cloaked women.
Their black wounds infected, their eyes
swollen shut. Their bodies beaten too,
but can’t be seen. I want to die.
Just last week, 12 sets of bones
from Viet Nam were buried in 12 ceremonies.
At sunset, I join the neighbors—with sangha,
life is
worth living—standing at the BART
station, holding lit candles, reminding
one and all that the 2,000th American
soldier has died in Iraq. Not counting
mercenaries, contract workers, Iraqis, Afghanis.
The children are quiet. How do their parents
explain war to them? “War.” A growl sound.
And the good—capitalistic?—of standing in
the street doing nothing? “People are fighting …”
But a “fight” connotes fairness, even-sidedness,
equal powers. “… And we’re being quiet, thinking
of them, and holding them in our hearts, safe.
We’re setting an example of not-fighting.
The honking cars are making good noise;
they’re honking Peace, Peace.”
Wednesday,
birthday eve, I tried re-reading
Don Quixote. (My writings are being translated
into Castellano and Catalan. La Dona Guerrera.)
The mad and sorry knight is only 50.
Delusions gone, illusions gone, he dies.
Books killed him. Cervantes worked on
Don Quijote de la Mancha while in jail.
For 5 years, he was given solitude,
and paper, ink, and pens, and time. In Chinese
jails, each prisoner is given the 4
valuable things, writes his or her life,
and is rehabilitated. I’ve been in jail too, but
so much going on, so many
people to socialize with, not a jot
of writing done. The charge against me:
DEMO IN A RESTRICTED ZONE—
WHITE HOUSE SIDEWALK. The U.S.
is turning Chinese, barricading
the White House, Forbidden City, Great Wall
along borders.
Now, it’s my birthday.
October 27. And Sylvia Plath’s.
And Dylan Thomas’s. Once on this date,
I was in Swansea, inside the poet’s
writing shed, a staged mess, bottles
and cups on table and floor. A postcard
of Einstein sticking out his tongue.
I like Thoreau’s house better, neat and tidy.
I walked out on Three Cliffs Bay.
Whole shells—cockles, mussels, clams,
golden clams, and snails, and oysters, jewels—
bestrew the endless wet land.
I cannot see to the last of it, not a lip of sea.
No surf. “We be surfers in Swansea.”
I’ve never seen tide go out so far.
“The furthest tide in the world.” I followed the gleam
of jewels—I was walking on sea bottom—
and walked out and out and out, like the tide
to the Celtic Sea. Until I remembered: the tide
will come back in, in a rush,
and run me down, and drown me. By the time
I see and hear incoming surf,
it will be too late. I ran
back for the seawall, so far away,
and made it, and did not die on that birthday.
Not ready to give myself up.
I have fears on my birthdays. Scared.
I am afraid, and need to write.
Keep this day. Save this moment.
Save each scrap of moment; write it down.
Save this moment. And this one. And this.
But I can’t go on noting every drip and drop.
I want poetry as it came to my young self
humming and rushing, no patience for
the chapter book.
I’m standing on top of a hill;
I can see everywhichway—
the long way that I came, and the few
places I have yet to go. Treat
my whole life as formally a day.
I used to be able, in hours, to relive,
to refeel my life from its baby beginnings
all the way to the present. 3 times
I slipped into lives before this one.
I have been a man in China, and a woman
in China, and a woman in the Wild West.
(My college roommate called; she’d met
Earll and me in Atlantis, but I don’t
remember that.) I’ve been married
to Earll for 3 lifetimes, counting
this one. From time to time, we lose each other,
but can’t divorce until we get it right.
Love, that is. Get love right. Get
marriage right. Earll won’t believe
in reincarnation, and makes fun of it.
The Dalai Lama in How to Expand Love
says to try “the possibility that past
and future rebirth over a continuum
of lives may take place.” We have forever.
Find me, love me, again.
I find you, I love you, again.
I’ve tried but could not see
my next life. All was immense black
space, no stars. After a while,
no more trying to progress, I returned—
was returned—to an ordinary scene that happened
yesterday, and every sunny day: Earll and I
are having a glass of wine with supper—bruschetta
from our own tomatoes and basil—under the trellis
of bougainvillea, periwinkly clematis,
and roses. Shadows and sunlight are moving at Indian
summer’s pace. The Big Fire burned
the grove of Monterey pines. We planted
purple rain birches, Australian tea
trees, dogwood, the elm, locust, catalpa,
3 redwoods from seed, 4 pepper
willows, and 7 kinds of fruit trees.
The katsura and the yucca are volunteers.
That Texas privet and the bamboo, survivors. Here,
I feel as I felt in Hawai‘i, as I felt in Eden.
A joy in place. Adam and Eve were never
thrown out; they grew old in the garden.
They returned after travels. So, I,
like the 14th Dalai Lama, have arrived
at my last incarnation? I don’t feel a good
enough person to be allowed off the wheel.
many mothers—nations, my race, the ghetto.
For enjoying unconsciousness and dreams, wanting
sleep like thirst for water. I left MaMa
for Berkeley, then 17 years in Hawai‘i.
Couldn’t come home winter and spring breaks,
nor summers. She asked, “How can I bear
your leaving?” No, I’m not translating right.
“Can I seh doc your leaving?” Seh doc
tells the pain of losing something valuable.
How can she afford my leaving?
Seh doc sounds like can write.
Sounds almost like my father’s name.
Father who left her behind in China for 15
years. I too left her.
“Lucky,” she bade and blessed, in English. “Lucky.”
She and Father stood at the gate, looking
after me. Looking after each child as
we left for college, left for Viet Nam.
Her eyes were large and all-holding.
No tears. She only cried when laughing.
Me too. I’m in tears laughing.
From the demimonde, Colette wrote, lying
to her mother, All’s well, I’m happy.
Our only son did not leave us;
we left him in Hawai‘i.
Generations. Karma. Ah Goong
walked my mother to the end of Tail End
Village. Whenever she looked back, he was still
standing there weeping and looking after her.
LEAVING HOME
I’ll watch over Wittman Ah Sing
go through the leaving of
his wife. A practicing artist
herself, Taña understands the wanter
of freedom. Let him go. If they stay put,
husband and wife lose each other anyway,
artist and artist dreaming up separate
existences. Go on roads through country you define
as you go. Wend through taboo mazes.
“But, Wittman,” says Taña, “ ’til death us do part.”
(Say those words, and you vow once again.)
“No, Taña, not death, only away awhile.”
Married so long, every word and moment is
thick with strata and fathoms and echoes.
35 years ago, they climbed
the Filbert Steps, walked in and out
of garden gates, pretended this house
and that house were home. They’d wed atop
Coit Tower. Look! Where it comes again.
Our wedding tower lifts out of the fog
and the forest edge of the City. “I need
to get to China, and I have to go
without helpmeet. I’ve been married to you
so long, my world is you. You
see a thing, I see it. The friends you
like, I like. The friends you can’t
stand, I can’t stand. My
perception is wedded to your perception.
You have artist’s eyes. I’d wind up
seeing the China you see. I want
to see for myself my own true China.”
Taña says, “So, you don’t want to be
with me, and we become old, old
lovers and old artists together. You,
my old lover. I love you, old lover.”
Wittman feels a rush that is Taña’s benevolence
for him suffuse him. He has to try harder
to leave her. “I love you, Taña. Thank you,
my wife, for our lifetime,
and our past lifetimes. We don’t
have to get divorce papers. We quit
being householders is all. The chi
connecting us will stretch infinitely.”
On such agreement, the long-married can part.
His birthday morning continues fair. The Bay
is busy with sailboats, and the ocean outside
the Golden Gate calmly opens forever.
All seems well, as though Water Margin
protected us. I have a soul, and it expands large
as I look out at the Pacific; I do
remember to look every single day.
Suddenly, I get scared. Some
fanatic is delivering by freighter or yacht or barge
or cruiser a nuke. BANG! The end.
The separating couple drive to Reno—not
for divorce but to give their son, Mario, a chance
to say Happy Birthday, Dad, and Goodbye.
Spelling each other at the wheel, they cross