My Father and My Mother Decide My Future
and How Could We Forget Wang Wei?






       The suitcase open on the bed.
      My grandfather is packing up his organs.
      When he is done, he takes a taxi to my grandmother’s
       house for supper.
      Exits the empty car to Taipei alley.

      Dissolve. Now the Los Altos lot.

So did you listen to him, my Father says taking his keys out of the
ignition. You should become a lawyer but your grandfather says
anything is fine. As long as you’re the best.
   My Father stays, my Mother stays silent. I sit and suck my thumb.
     I saw your painting. It was beautiful, my Mother says to
Wang Wei, restrained beside me by backseat-belt and streetlight
   world—Wang Wei who says:

      In the silent bamboo woods, sitting along
      Playing strings and bellowing long.

But America is allergic to bamboo, my Father says to Wang Wei. They
love skill sets, cash and the first person singular,
the language of C++ not our English. Steps out,
shuts the door, puts gas pump by Acura trunk. My father’s son
does not understand, forgets the Chinese
he never remembered. But my mother holds words in her mouth:
      The Peking opera soundtrack of my childhood.
You sound like it. I’d listen to it on the radio. You know, when I had to
sweep the floor. And then Wang Wei:

      Nobody knows but the deep grove
      and the luminous moon that glows in response.

California moon not glow—or as the translation might say, irradiates instead
like beige screen before my Mother, now at HP after Taipei
   and degree in Home Ec
and divorce. My Mother like the moon which rents light from its past,
my Mother who says, looking at the dashboard, You should listen to
your father. I don’t know. Here he comes.
     My Father unlocks the door and says, Dropped the keys in the
toilet. But that’s what life is like. You’re young, my Father says,
I’m not sure to me or Wang Wei, You don’t understand
the world, the world which loves those who
enter it and then Wang Wei:

      Red hearts in the southern country
      Spring comes with stems enlarging.
      I didn’t know you two were still together.

We’re not, my Father says. He is unsentimental and gestures
at the wish that furnishes the mind of his son.
     Your son? asks Wang Wei. He has seen me and become real, as
though a ghost could die into a man. Not the monk you quite expect,
Wang Wei wears a cowboy’s deadened face and stares
at you not unlike an establishing
shot. He says, Who are you?
      Like the scene in the movie, where the actors
find the camera and say Stop
looking at me, they quit the car and stand. And I say:

      Wish you’d gather some, caught me
      More of this thing that is longing.

And Wang Wei asks Who are you?
And my Father says Decide.


- - -

Yes, No, Yes, The Future, Gone, Happy, Yes, No, Yes, Cut, You






The first sentence of this poem is not about you.
   In this respect, it is unlike the last sentence and my heart.
Is the heart a thing that can be about something?
   We were about
   to break up and after that, we broke up.
Did it have to end in this—I mean, was there anything
else I could have done?
   See third-to-last sentence.
When dinner wilts into memory,
when the frost florescent bars in parking lots
spangle out like bones blooming from a tree,
when I busy myself out towards sleep, wheel around,
adorned-in by alone from every direction,
when the moon outdopples the ambulance siren and the evening
pollutes itself with reference, suffused by our lost
elbow-clasping smoky-tender moist and utmost shirtless plucked-up
naked nights—
when I miss you, does that make the first sentence false?
   Because I think about you more now that
   my life no longer mentions you.
If statement is when
antecedent and consequent clap their hands: having thought
for a while, having understood
what we have built behind us, let me ask
what is the wilderness
charring the scene before me?
   It is called the future, the branches feathery
   and lowing in the wind.
Now call the consequent a painting and why don’t I see you in this painting?
   Now that you are no longer here, a scar floats as halo
   above my scalp and when you come back, I grow jealous
   of your talents.
What are my talents?
   You are so good at being happy, a skill I too
   practice (or try to practice) and despise.
Well, don’t worry—I’ve been to the future and seen that scar
evaporate into a crown. Will you call me in September?
   The conversation was boring—fat pauses like
   lakes and I didn’t know what to say.
Did I want to hang up?
   No, never. I must have loved you.
Are questions like relationships?
   Questions have answers, unless they are questions nine or two.
What are questions for?
   One can use a question mark for many things. For example: as a
     sickle for cutting people’s hearts off.
How can you cut someone off with a question?
   You know, like when I said, “Yeah, but we’re still in love with
   each other, right?” and you told me the answer.


- - -
(Note from Editor: The text from “Adversarial” appears below as Ken Chen reads it during the show. The poem, however, can be read in two different sequences. Click here for both versions to open in their own separate tabs!)

Adversarial






   1. Even if God, who possesses infinite time and proficiency, read
      every work of literature, he would still lack a neutral position from
      which to evaluate the texts. He would find his adjudication tainted by
      the unavoidable task of reading the books in sequence. My disputant
      replied that a creature as impossible as God would find little problem
      reading every single work after every other one, including itself.

   2. “Indeed, one of the most    important books of Abelard, Sic et Non
      (Yes and No), merely documents by successive quotations a list of over
      150 inconsistencies and discrepancies in the Bible and in the writings
      of the church fathers and other authorities, assuming them all to be
      true and leaving it to the reader to try to harmonize them.” Harold J.
      Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western
      Legal Tradition.

Last night, I saw Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh and was struck by a scene in which a thirteen-year-old girl tells van Gogh that food is better than painting. If he stops painting, she says, he will live. If he stops eating, he will die. I thought about this and decided that it was an unfair comparison. Although food is more necessary than painting, each painting on its own is less replaceable. We may be required to eat, but it matters little what we eat so long as we participate in the general activity of food.
      I told my neighbor about this scene and reasoned further that if we stop painting, we will live, but if we do not love one another, we will die.
      My neighbor disagreed, on the basis that my ex was not “The One.”
      I replied that everyone is “The One” because everyone is unique.
      He thought for a moment and replied: “The germane analogy for the lover is not painting, but food. If everyone is equally unique, then everyone is equally replaceable.”

And when we found each other under the lake and when we held
each other under that lake and had he air, he would have whispered
Am I drowning and can I drown some more? In the bog of our bed, washed
up and sweat-hot, my heart began the timid beat boxing when I spoke
your name, wet name that conquers down into my throat and woke
your dozing heart. The day is drying to meet you! So, squeeze the
lime-sun and pour yourself on this nail and we shall dance together,
in spite of my allergies. Drag yourself by the hair to the motel where
our future selves fuck forgot to make reservations it’s okay we’ll sleep
in the station wagon, thriving in our own way, not nostalgic for when
we first met. Waited three days to present ourselves barefoot in the
snow and confess. Night coming, we wade slow towards our cold
milkfresh star, the eyelid theater that intrudes on sleep, the mix CDs
and Polaroids—tender proof of all our past! Neither of us knows how
the story will end, except that it is morning and we have just been
born, our hearts ladled with larks, no—sparrowsong and NPR
drenching the cool apartment, you kissing my eyes while I pretend
I’m still asleep.

- - -
POSTSCRIPT
Juvenilia at
Yale Website (w/ video clip)
Amazon
Asian American Writer’s Workshop
Ken at Harriet the Blog
When Ken said “outdopples” I thought of this Hopkins poem
What’s on Data’s mind whilst kissing
Link to the comprehensive and varied list of Ken’s writing at his home page

My new homepage
The Worm God that got away
Van Gogh

Poet in New York

In Lorca’s inked self-portrait,
a heart trails arteries grafted to tenement roofs,
blood-bearing roots not yet
yanked from windblown earth of the city’s ceiling.

Pigeons silhouetted on my shutters are like bodies falling
& I can’t find the poem
where men step from sills in the stock market crash,
but brace myself here: Tierra tú mismo
que nadas por los números de la oficina.

Find this — a cosmology, ghost limb —
in geraniums sprouting
from unturned compost, in the bone fragment
by manhole cover, in estuary mud.

~

The felt absence of the city:

downtown, a man’s nervous system
sways in a small aquarium like a shirt on a hanger,
flesh boiled from rag-picker
drapes of ganglion & sacral, the radiant
plasma jellyfish of perception.

Or how a friend, a potter, placed her beloved
Labrador in the outdoor kiln & found, next morning,
in the ashes, two perfect clay lungs.

~

The buffeting wind off the Hudson, flowering
lettuce & sage
scrawled with arithmetic
of dust over Brooklyn in lungs & leaves
scrubbing the air — Lorca

in purslane growing from fallout soil, in blood
cancer, Lorca in ailanthus reeking of unburied flesh —

I walk rooftops scattering nettles.

- - -

Phaethon

Unburned fuel rains to coat the wings of moths
descended from those Nabokov caught
in his cedar wardrobe. Boys trail their fathers
through flowers of the steppe
to help lift fallen rocket metal bound for black markets
onto flatbeds of trucks, engines
singing in the cold, the tang of dimethyl hydrazine
on their lips, chewing a bit of wheat.
In bed tonight, you say there must be
some height above the earth where the organ of skin,
if you found yourself caught there, naked,
would not catch fire despite the rough holystone
of stars caressing your face, despite
the scorched fields calling you down.
The whole deal is human, I say. What few stars
I’ve seen make it past that moment
incinerate roots of wheat after evaporating the snow.
Listen to yourself, you say. You have nothing
to do with how this is told.
Pale world, we lie doused in winter sunlight
like a fuselage fractured, ringing with heat in sedge,
soldier orchid, & trout lily the color of moth.
We gather these things because they can’t break free.
And though we are how cancer blooms
it’s not as though making it through unaltered is the point.

- - -

Half-Ourselves & Half-Not

If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.

Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.

Here, then—thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank

of the species boundary, for a chimera.
Like fiber optics, human nerves

lay along glassy bone & spinal veins of a fetal mouse
that will be drowned before ever waking.

A hen’s brain replaces a quail’s—nodding, cooing,
not understanding the change. Less human, less nature.

Less solace in these songs half-ourselves
& half-not. Did I wake you, my singing?

Here, the sphere of angels & here the sphere of sea.
Darwin, writing in his garden, remembers the sea

like some sleep he feared he’d never wake from.
If all men were dead then monkeys make men,

he noted for himself, &, almost as an aside—Men makes angels.
If my nerves were fed to an osprey, a finch,

could she still take wing? Rain
behind the bedroom blinds, I will wake, won’t I,

to your cells replacing mine, this cape lionness
liver, aorta of a garter snake, &, from a goat twisted

with an orb spider, milk boiled down to silk, gossamer
the structure of Bethlehem steel?

- - -
POSTSCRIPT
All poems printed or reprinted with permission from the author.

Colin’s website
From here, you can read more poems and pick up your copy of HERE BE MONSTERS!

Lorca’s Self-Portrait
Colin mentions this in his first poem

Salvaging the Wreck
Phaeton Influence

Scene in Jarhead I thought of

Flowers mentioned in the poems
Purslane

Ailanthus or Tree of Heaven

Sage

Flowering Lettuce

Nettles

Soldier’s Orchid

Trout Lily

Colin felt that the phrase “felt absence” came from somewhere else. Looks like someone has been reading Othello, Act III Scene IV :

BIANCA

O Cassio, whence came this?
This is some token from a newer friend:
To the felt absence now I feel a cause:
Is’t come to this? Well, well.

The Singularity is Near
Book I couldn’t think of in the last part about rapidly advancing technology

Summer Reading
Darwin’s notebooks, including the Transmutation Notebooks from which Colin quotes in the last poem

Spider Silk Goat Milk

Photo by Bianca Stone.