If language lights the firmament between
the broken boards of nowhere towns where once
prosperity waved from long windowed mills
like a brick Rapunzel you could climb up
on herself, then what of the silence in
this laundromat, silence of hair rollers,
broken brogues, cheap sweaters cheaply worn
in the diurnal pursuit of happiness?
We're two cigarettes logged like burnt galleons
in the muddy mains of Styrofoam cups.
The word that lit the beginning was sprayed
on that green wall at three a.m. and our
world oozed from it grey as this filthy floor.

A child's blue sweatshirt
laid on white underwear
by his mother's red hand.
Don't you understand?
Socks, a little pair,
toes still dark with dirt,
an old man's handkerchief,
a blanket end that's frayed,
sheets stained by blood or beer—
all emblems of love or fear;
in here we're wordlessly made
intimate with joy and grief.

That woman huge from eating french fries hoists
her basket up on her hillock hip, a
guignol tabloid for cherry atop the
sundae of computer age poverty,
shrieks down at the inured boy stunning
ants at the open door--of what is this
correlative?  The washing machine like
a Spenglerian Zeitgeist whirls through cycles
of burgeoning, froth, decay.  This morning
I dreamt I was a pigeon hopping on a
cracked sidewalk.  Between my squamous
toes I picked gaily at dried bubblegum,
then woke to a dawn void of devotion.

I went walking out at dawn
through quiet streets and thought
of the five years I was insane.
Fell overnight a little rain;
here or there a droplet caught
the sun and jeweled a lawn.
Cleanliness can be construed:
having sunk in each day's mire
to wash away a week of hurt.
I would be my breadlike shirt
so fragrant from the dryer,
old and torn and yet renewed.
                        

1.

That’s me, like the duck in Peter and the Wolf,
stomach-bound tumescence of tummy, tedious and
two weeks’ tardy.
                                Please note how she has placed 
her hands just so on either side, palms wide.
It’s the way you press ears against screams,
hold basketballs, heft watermelons or,
just before the crescendo, two cymbals.
Notice how smugly she smiles daddycamerawards
perhaps proud of her unswollen calves
or maybe musing in Mozart on me
marveling at Mommy, gravid and enceinte.

Am I an accident, a fantasy fruition
of some seductive song, mere negligence?
Will her striations be held against me?
Did a thick umbilicus of the spirit
pulse within the salt red placenta,
inside the tepid planet-sea of her,
beating at the threshold of our bodies?
Look at her—in love with the idea of me.
In the background a large tired woman,
possibly black, lumbers off a bus.
Four houses peel in vague French grey.
Mother’s homemade dress is cheap gingham.
In this picture taken by my father
she is twenty.
                       I am zero.


2.

One and one to two were drawn as one
and that two, becoming one indeed,
like droplets of November-driven rain
fused on my nursery’s windowpane,
one thesis egg, antithesis seed,
synthesized in this flesh, this bone.

But two was never one, or rather were, for
civil war cannot bind all unions tight;
when divisibility charges the air
it’s each nose for itself.  Look at my hair
all gold and brushed out for the night,
shining like the brasswork on the door.
Father’s lap was firm, his arms as strong
as the chimney or the book-rich walls.
Look how unbald his head is as he
hunches lovingly to sniff baby-me
on the crown.  Still, a house divided falls
and counterpoint undoes a simple song.

Here you cannot see how my stomach aches
or how lance-like words still hover
over my pink birthday cake.  The noise
is inaudible to these girls and boys
all unprepared to duck and cover
or feel the radiation discord makes.

A lying portrait means a lying tale,
yet here the lie in the ensemble lies,
not in my father’s chin or mother’s cheek.
They looked just like that; useless to seek
some cipher in those eyebrows or those eyes.
I know, I’m searching still; and I always fail.


3.

I snapped that one.  It’s his mahogany
desk.  I placed the pen, that book, his pipe 
to imply something, a fourteen-year-old’s idea
of art.  Still, you can easily see that,
unlike me, my father is an orphan.
Plump on the mazed Shiraz rug I’d look up;
he’d be staring down at his desk, so I
envied it, and him.  He yanked me
up on his lap and let me draw,
pretend to type, festoon his paperclips,
chains to hold nothing, his attention.
And here I am crying before my bath.
Splendid tubtime when the odd trajectory of
his life led to bombing with a beachbucket
my shampooed onion head—such a lovely whoosh.
That blue spruce was in my grandmother’s yard;
it’s summertime, see the edge of the wading pool?
Each July he sent me stories from his desk,
elbows sticking to the urethane,
with inept pictures and jokes I didn’t
get till yesterday.
There you see him
at his ease beside me at my aunt’s.
How we argued over that dress!  His legs are
crossed while mine are not.  You can’t see his
arm’s around my shoulder.  I loved turtle-
necks that year.
		      None of these shows the Prussian
rigor of our life, how order saved us;
none reveals whether he felt locked up
in my helplessness, loathed vacuuming,
cream of wheat, sexlessness, or relished
being every inch my father.
		 What a
recluse he’s become! I thought as I shot
this last one, home from the blue blur of exams
and bathtubs clogged with beer.  Mouth shut,
wallet open, he has just declared.  His
sweater’s thicker than his hair, but his eyes
pierce the camera lens, sharp with secrets still.
                        

In Pingyao, as they began to lash my back and chest,
I could just hear little girls chanting “Rice-Bowl-Rice”:
Through green doors, across red pavement, that jolly song. 

When they dragged me off to be questioned in Nanyang
Melancholy music wafted from Three River Tavern,
Just the sort to make bargemen soften like medlars.

I curled up contentedly by a great sow near Chuchow,
No less warmed than she by our soiled straw,
Our cradle rocked by Feng’s fierce horsemen tramping by.

Wuchow’s streets ran with festive dragons, crackers burst,
Women warbled, children cheered, babies bawled as
General Fu ran his so-eager finger over my skull.