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tặng mẹ [và ba tôi]
for my mother [& father]
The landscape crossed out with a pen
reappears here
Bei Dao
Contents
Title Page
Note to Reader
Dedication
Threshold
I.
Telemachus
Trojan
Aubade with Burning City
A Little Closer to the Edge
Immigrant Haibun
Always & Forever
My Father Writes from Prison
Headfirst
In Newport I Watch My Father Lay His Cheek to a Beached Dolphin’s Wet Back
The Gift
Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds
II.
Thanksgiving 2006
Homewrecker
Of Thee I Sing
Because It’s Summer
Into the Breach
Anaphora as Coping Mechanism
Seventh Circle of Earth
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
Eurydice
Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown): oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952
Queen Under The Hill
III.
Torso of Air
Prayer for the Newly Damned
To My Father / To My Future Son
Deto(nation)
Ode to Masturbation
Notebook Fragments
The Smallest Measure
Daily Bread
Odysseus Redux
Logophobia
Someday I’ll Love Ocean Vuong
Devotion
Notes
Also by Ocean Vuong
Acknowledgments
Copyright
Special Thanks
Threshold
In the body, where everything has a price,
I was a beggar. On my knees,
I watched, through the keyhole, not
the man showering, but the rain
over his globed shoulders.
He was singing, which is why
I remember it. His voice—
it filled me to the core
like a skeleton. Even my name
knelt down inside me, asking
to be spared.
He was singing. It is all I remember.
For in the body, where everything has a price,
I was alive. I didn’t know
there was a better reason.
That one morning, my father would stop
—a dark colt paused in downpour—
& listen for my clutched breath
behind the door. I didn’t know the cost
of entering a song—was to lose
your way back.
So I entered. So I lost.
I lost it all with my eyes
wide open.
I
Telemachus
Like any good son, I pull my father out
of the water, drag him by his hair
through white sand, his knuckles carving a trail
the waves rush in to erase. Because the city
beyond the shore is no longer
where we left it. Because the bombed
cathedral is now a cathedral
of trees. I kneel beside him to see how far
I might sink. Do you know who I am,
Ba? But the answer never comes. The answer
is the bullet hole in his back, brimming
with seawater. He is so still I think
he could be anyone’s father, found
the way a green bottle might appear
at a boy’s feet containing a year
he has never touched. I touch
his ears. No use. I turn him
over. To face it. The cathedral
in his sea-black eyes. The face
not mine—but one I will wear
to kiss all my lovers good-night:
the way I seal my father’s lips
with my own & begin
the faithful work of drowning.
Trojan
A finger’s worth of dark from daybreak, he steps
into a red dress. A flame caught
in a mirror the width of a coffin. Steel glinting
in the back of his throat. A flash, a white
asterisk. Look
how he dances. The bruise-blue wallpaper peeling
into hooks as he twirls, his horse
-head shadow thrown on the family
portraits, glass cracking beneath
its stain. He moves like any
other fracture, revealing the briefest doors. The dress
petaling off him like the skin
of an apple. As if their swords
aren’t sharpening
inside him. This horse with its human
face. This belly full of blades
& brutes. As if dancing could stop the heart
of his murderer from beating
between his ribs. How easily a boy in a dress
the red of shut eyes
vanishes
beneath the sound of his own
galloping. How a horse will run until it breaks
into weather—into wind. How like
the wind, they will see him. They will see him
clearest
when the city burns.
Aubade with Burning City
South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving
Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent
Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese
refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.
Milkflower petals in the street
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright ...
He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.
Open, he says.
She opens.
Outside, a soldier spits out
his cigarette as footsteps fill the square like stones
fallen from the sky. May
all your Christmases be white
as the traffic guard unstraps his holster.
His fingers running the hem
of her white dress. A single candle.
Their shadows: two wicks.
A military truck speeds through the intersection, children
shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled
through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog
lies panting in the road. Its h
ind legs
crushed into the shine
of a white Christmas.
On the bed stand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard
for the first time.
The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police
facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.
A palm-sized photo of his father soaking
beside his left ear.
The song moving through the city like a widow.
A white ... A white ... I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow
falling from her shoulders.
Snow scraping against the window. Snow shredded
with gunfire. Red sky.
Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.
A helicopter lifting the living just
out of reach.
The city so white it is ready for ink.
The radio saying run run run.
Milkflower petals on a black dog
like pieces of a girl’s dress.
May your days be merry and bright. She is saying
something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks
beneath them. The bed a field of ice.
Don’t worry, he says, as the first shell flashes
their faces, my brothers have won the war
and tomorrow ...
The lights go out.
I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...
to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...
In the square below: a nun, on fire,
runs silently toward her god—
Open, he says.
She opens.
A Little Closer to the Edge
Young enough to believe nothing
will change them, they step, hand in hand,
into the bomb crater. The night full
of black teeth. His faux Rolex, weeks
from shattering against her cheek, now dims
like a miniature moon behind her hair.
In this version, the snake is headless—stilled
like a cord unraveled from the lovers’ ankles.
He lifts her white cotton skirt, revealing
another hour. His hand. His hands. The syllables
inside them. O father, O foreshadow, press
into her—as the field shreds itself
with cricket cries. Show me how ruin makes a home
out of hip bones. O mother,
O minute hand, teach me
how to hold a man the way thirst
holds water. Let every river envy
our mouths. Let every kiss hit the body
like a season. Where apples thunder
the earth with red hooves. & I am your son.
Immigrant Haibun
The road which leads me to you is safe
even when it runs into oceans.
Edmond Jabès
*
Then, as if breathing, the sea swelled beneath us. If you must know anything, know that the hardest task is to live only once. That a woman on a sinking ship becomes a life raft—no matter how soft her skin. While I slept, he burned his last violin to keep my feet warm. He lay beside me and placed a word on the nape of my neck, where it melted into a bead of whiskey. Gold rust down my back. We had been sailing for months. Salt in our sentences. We had been sailing—but the edge of the world was nowhere in sight.
*
When we left it, the city was still smoldering. Otherwise it was a perfect spring morning. White hyacinths gasped in the embassy lawn. The sky was September-blue and the pigeons went on pecking at bits of bread scattered from the bombed bakery. Broken baguettes. Crushed croissants. Gutted cars. A carousel spinning its blackened horses. He said the shadow of missiles growing larger on the sidewalk looked like god playing an air piano above us. He said There is so much I need to tell you.
*
Stars. Or rather, the drains of heaven—waiting. Little holes. Little centuries opening just long enough for us to slip through. A machete on the deck left out to dry. My back turned to him. My feet in the eddies. He crouches beside me, his breath a misplaced weather. I let him cup a handful of the sea into my hair and wring it out. The smallest pearls—and all for you. I open my eyes. His face between my hands, wet as a cut. If we make it to shore, he says, I will name our son after this water. I will learn to love a monster. He smiles. A white hyphen where his lips should be. There are seagulls above us. There are hands fluttering between the constellations, trying to hold on.
*
The fog lifts. And we see it. The horizon—suddenly gone. An aqua sheen leading to the hard drop. Clean and merciful—just like he wanted. Just like the fairy tales. The one where the book closes and turns to laughter in our laps. I pull the mast to full sail. He throws my name into the air. I watch the syllables crumble into pebbles across the deck.
*
Furious roar. The sea splitting at the bow. He watches it open like a thief staring into his own heart: all bones and splintered wood. Waves rising on both sides. The ship encased in liquid walls. Look! he says, I see it now! He’s jumping up and down. He’s kissing the back of my wrist as he clutches the wheel. He laughs but his eyes betray him. He laughs despite knowing he has ruined every beautiful thing just to prove beauty cannot change him. And here’s the kicker: there’s a cork where the sunset should be. It was always there. There’s a ship made from toothpicks and superglue. There’s a ship in a wine bottle on the mantel in the middle of a Christmas party—eggnog spilling from red Solo cups. But we keep sailing anyway. We keep standing at the bow. A wedding-cake couple encased in glass. The water so still now. The water like air, like hours. Everyone’s shouting or singing and he can’t tell whether the song is for him—or the burning rooms he mistook for childhood. Everyone’s dancing while a tiny man and woman are stuck inside a green bottle thinking someone is waiting at the end of their lives to say Hey! You didn’t have to go this far. Why did you go so far? Just as a baseball bat crashes through the world.
*
If you must know anything, know that you were born because no one else was coming. The ship rocked as you swelled inside me: love’s echo hardening into a boy. Sometimes I feel like an ampersand. I wake up waiting for the crush. Maybe the body is the only question an answer can’t extinguish. How many kisses have we crushed to our lips in prayer—only to pick up the pieces? If you must know, the best way to understand a man is with your teeth. Once, I swallowed the rain through a whole green thunderstorm. Hours lying on my back, my girlhood open. The field everywhere beneath me. How sweet. That rain. How something that lives only to fall can be nothing but sweet. Water whittled down to intention. Intention into nourishment. Everyone can forget us—as long as you remember.
*
Summer in the mind.
God opens his other eye:
two moons in the lake.
Always & Forever
Open this when you need me most,
he said, as he slid the shoe box, wrapped
in duct tape, beneath my bed. His thumb,
still damp from the shudder between mother’s
thighs, kept circling the mole above my brow.
The devil’s eye blazed between his teeth
or was he lighting a joint? It doesn’t matter. Tonight
I wake & mistake the bathwater wrung
from mother’s hair for his voice. I open
the shoe box dusted with seven winters
& here, sunk in folds of yellowed news
-paper, lies the Colt .45—silent & heavy
as an amputated hand. I hold the gun
& wonder if an entry wound in the night
would make a hole wide as morning. That if