Ten Poems

Our Soonimi

When she was young she left the village
and worked night and day at an export factory
around the time industrialization began,
our Soonimi.

I saw her on TV tonight
her hands flecked like a turtle’s back.

Old grandma now, Soonimi shares blackberry wine
with seniors at the village center
hugging a dark-eyed grandchild
born to her Southeast Asian daughter-in-law.
In an era that’s global—not to belabor the word—
she lives ahead of her time in a global world,
creating a warm and content multicultural family,
and all I’ve been doing since college
is writing poems with my clean hands,
my gaze lost in world literature.


 

Buddha of Mud

Goodbye my love,
I’ll stay here in the mud.
No separation could be as easy as leaves
detaching from a tree.
After I sent you away, alone I pulled thorns out of the earth and sky.
I believed we’d walk together till the end of the line,
but we were felled by the sword of the winds.
The word love sometimes
imprisons you, blinds you,
like the green lights used for night fishing.
Concealed from me in the mud,
it pushed me down to the murkiest place.
Nowhere to go in that vast abyss.
For a long time I’ll remain dark as a black seed,
softening flowers and sins.
While you go by another name
I’ll be a little clay Buddha
who turns the lone light off and on alone
as I squirm in the mud.

 

Bengali Night

The car halts at the four-way stop.
A woman carrying a child on her back approaches.
Pointing at the child’s mouth,
her begging floods the car.
Like an automated doll, the child extends
her tiny mushroom hands through the window.
Hurriedly I search my wallet for a 10-rupee note,
then the light changes and the car pulls away.
Buried in lots of 100-rupee bills—
one invisible 10-rupee bill.
Ugggh! As I arrive at the hotel, I calculate
that 100 rupees is only $1.50.
I needle-poke myself through the night.
The flesh hurts; the blood warm.
Thrusting a needle into my habit of low and stingy penny-pinching,
I stamp myself: FAT TRAMP.
What were all those numbers and math I learned in school for, anyway?
Skinny hands, pecking at tiny words,
a dried-up well.
Through the long, desolate Bengali night,
without even a falling star,
I crawl around like a silverfish.

 


On the Way to the Airport

After asking the blue-bearded driver in a turban
to drive me to the airport
I gazed at the subtropical monsoon through the window.
I’ll become a hermit when I get home.
My lips are parched from travel fatigue.
The cab rushed, zigzagging through the city, avoiding cows,
then abruptly came to a stop before a red fort.
“You’re witnessing the beautiful dawning
of the moment when a holy man is born.
Now there is nowhere to wander on this earth.”
For a long time the driver stared into the distance,
as if overwhelmed by his own sudden awakening.
Then he was gone.
This is a land of bustling poets.
Am I locked in the Mogul empire
—a grave amidst jewels—
as if searching for transience
in cremated bones?
What can I dig for again with my bare hands?
If I don’t make it there in this life,
I’ll get there in the next.




A Poet’s Bed

A poet’s bed at Mount Etna
Cliff to volcano! At a stubborn edge of loneliness
You wouldn’t mention the crater
From bed one sees the mountain base
Where people walk forward
As if dead

Why won’t a whole body crawl like a snake
Or walk on air like the bird at dusk
Tucking two feet under feathers
To make life a small round stone
Cracking when hurled
A splendid and hot magnetic field lined with grey towel
Boredom received as gift
In a poet’s bed at Mount Etna
Dreaming dreams in the arabesque pattern of grey towel lining




Salt Flower

Though I have crossed many oceans
I cannot recover my tears

I do not know
Why the ocean bottom is sand
Whether the current is everything
A long wave overflows
Why a fresh changeable flower blooms iron;
Whether it’s the anxious craning of seabirds, exhaling

If my poem
Says to ask a question
I’ll likely throw it away
I don’t know
I’m still overcoming tears
If I dry them a dazzling
Salt flower will bloom




Camel Thorn

I chew camel thorn
A desert blooming thorn
That like a camel pushes into the desert’s throat

To stuff bursting silence into its heart
The root searches desert endlessly for water
At its desperate end shoots into heaven
Stabs air
And holds on

I cannot walk on air like a bird
With quick barefoot on hot sand
I chew the poisoned nettles—bunched stars in darkness
Blood flows on my tongue
And in my throat fresh blood


 

Iron Chair

I sit my spine on an iron chair to eat rice.
That it’s called rice makes it happy and sad
Rice? To eat and stand—to live, I hear.

One spoonful passes through the throat
One rice grain at a time, I eat homesickness

Outside the window a bird in a thorn bush! Please don’t go
Let’s eat rice together
The spine sits on an iron chair
Pecking and eating the bird’s sound of rage
A jailbird
I pull apart and eat my whole body
And a few bells of tears for my dessert


 

Letter from a Daughter


Dear Father,
I’m over here, alive
That day, when with a knife hidden near my chest
I slit the drum at Lelang
What I slit—well, but for me
The drum would have sounded

Such was my fate
With my hand,
I cut your country apart
Even now the moment is vivid

Trembling with dread and guilt
My body, thrown to blindness
Had been a wild wind,
Ho Dong, handsome as the moon
When I cut the drum, it wasn’t to obey him
My love a bloom on war’s dizzying cliff
Was life

Rather than a ruin revealed.
A black cloth covered me, alone
When I clutched and raised the knife
To slit the drum
The stars in heaven rolled quivering
That dark despair
Was entirely mine




School of Trees

I meant to learn from an old tree
how every year, without fail, its age increased
even if the tree stopped doing simple math.
Like the tree, I would engrave my age.
Walking among evergreens
a branch—
fall, a yellow hand touched my shoulder
to say I love you! pierced by chest
At an old temple in the back garden
Smile! was said against a forest background
and the moment was fixed
The mature tree’s surface does not betray its age—
young as long as it has new hope
I meant to learn from an old tree
to inscribe a center.
More than anything, I vowed to become more luxurious
thicker the next year.