In Each, Every Direction

The first time I ever wrote a poem was at Donut World. Before then, I’d never considered writing poetry—writing anything, really. I have always been frightened of words, and so I was surprised when all those letters approached me, clung together, kept building until all I could do was nurture them and eventually put them down, as if to sleep, in neat rows. 

I’m not sure what brought the words on—I was thinking about decisions. It started small, with me wishing I’d picked a different kind of donut, and it grew as simple thoughts until it reached the point where I was reconsidering every choice in my life, all the accumulated events that had led me to Donut World.

Sitting on a red stool, I typed away on my phone—avoiding putting pen to paper as a person who fears words does—a poem that had nothing to do with choice and consequence, except it likely had everything to do with choice and consequence. Then the words stopped coming, and I knew I had to stop. I would leave the poem unfinished for a time, somehow with the sense that new words would visit me soon.

I sent what lines I had to my twin brother. I wanted to share them with him before anyone else. In all that time thinking about decisions, he was the first person I wanted to speak with. We were in our mid-twenties when I wrote the beginnings of my first poem. We were in different places in our lives. He was married, finishing his law degree, creating a new life for himself and his family. I was at Donut World.

Recently, he asked about the book I’m writing. How much have you written?

Not much, I said, choosing to keep it short and not ramble on about the pages and pages I’d written that would never make it into the final manuscript because they were all wrong, all focused on a completely different subject than the matter at hand: him. Sentences refused to come for the topic I’d chosen; they came for my brother. Words have a tendency to run away from you as much as towards you. The pages fill up, seem to spill out in every direction. There’s still a lot of research that needs to be done, I added, and then asked about his children.



In researching a place, a disputed place, an uninhabited island, I read a poem. I read another, which is actually a different translation of the first. Both appear in a book arguing that the islands of Diaoyu | Diaoyutai | Senkaku have always belonged to China, and not to Japan. The evidence: the islands are referenced in Chinese poems and other writings as early as 1403.

I find myself moving out further from the claims of nations, as if I were caught, a fish in a net on a boat heading away from the islands. The lines of each poem become stuck in my head. I confuse them, their slight variations. I pull them apart and jumble them unintentionally.  Eventually, the words drift back, refusing to fuse, committed only to their own company.

This poem—or poems, depending on how you divide the translated word from the other, what is sometimes called the original—was written by Qing envoy Qi Kun and appears in his collection Eight Poems on My Voyage to Ryukyu. Written aboard a vessel headed towards what is now Okinawa, Qi Kun’s poems capture a contrast transition of someone approaching, of someone leaving, in waves.

 

 
The first translation goes:

The fisherman has already left,
The island is still there.
The island’s full of cliffs,
Bashed by waves upon waves.
Who is that man there
Climbing toward the island summit?
In a straw rain cape,
He appears tiny on top.

 
The island is still there. A relief. Almost as if it would suddenly be hidden in mist, lost at any second, overtaken by the perpetual bashing of waves. How abundant the cliffs must have been, to remark that the island was full of them; the island has reached capacity—there is no room left for more cliffs.

In the poem I am drawn not to the island, its cliffs, the waves, nor the fisherman. My attention is stolen by another figure: the nameless man, the one who climbs, who wears a straw cape, who is tiny on top. Why did they reveal themselves on the summit only after the fisherman had already left? When the vessel was already far off?

I am left with questions and no one to pose them to, as if  dispatched to an island myself, only to climb the summit to cry out for help and find all I can do is look out for a fisherman already gone. I could call my brother and ask him about the person on the summit above the waves, who appears tiny, but I don’t.

The other translation goes:

When the fisherman is gone,
The island is still theory.
The island’s full of summits,
Beaten by waves upon waves.
Who has invited him there?
He’s on the summit alone.
Dressed in a coir raincoat,
He’s dwarfed on the summit.

The nameless man emerges from his hiding place while the poet Qi Kun is busy considering the island, how very imposing it is with all its summits and fullnesses. It is necessary for Qi Kun to keep an eye on the island, to capture it before it’s out of sight, now that the fisherman is gone. Gone where?

Then there is the ever-uncomfortable situation here of the uninvited guest. The nameless man was not invited to the island and so arrived in the poem instead, dressed in his raincoat who watches the poet as the island falls out of sight, off the edges of his page.

In the first translation, I am led to see the nameless man as a ghost. In the second translation, the nameless man can only be the poet himself. Placed on a passing island, momentarily, to be dwarfed, to be made tiny, to be a poet, alone on a summit.

 


I force another poem. I keep the similarities of the two and remove the differences. I conceive identical poems:

The fisherman has already left,
The island is still there.
The island’s full of cliffs,
Bashed by waves upon waves.
Who is that man there
Climbing toward the island summit?
In a straw rain cape,
He appears tiny on top.

When the fisherman is gone,
The island is still theory.
The island’s full of summits,
Beaten by waves upon waves.
Who has invited himthere?
He’s on the summit alone.
Dressed in a coir raincoat,
He’s dwarfed on the summit

Besides fish, what else would a fisherman be full of but waves? Passing a summit drenched in rain, meeting a fisherman beaten and bashed by waves all his own, is the spectator, the disturber, me, you, carried on waves from elsewhere.

Like most twins, these identical poems are eager to reveal their differences. They are compelled to show off their varied shapes, the strike-throughs marking them exact and definitively inexact. Even in words, odd in appearance.

Frustration grows in the identical poems. They must prove their uniqueness. One shouts the fisherman has already left as the other shouts the fisherman is gone, but the words become garbled, a poor argument for difference. The identical poems agree distance might be the best solution.

 


My brother and I are not poems. We are fraternal twins, which means we were always two and never once one.

When my twin brother and I started school, we were placed in different classrooms. It was the first time we had ever been separated, though only by a single door, for such an extensive period. Our parents and our teachers thought it would be best for us: to find a place without the other. My grandmother reminds me how devastating those first weeks were for me. She says I could only stay for a few minutes before I started crying uncontrollably, before the teachers would call her to come get me.

Instead of transferring me into my brother’s class, the teachers—and my parents—were determined to keep us separated. They offered possible solutions:

What if grandmother stayed for a little bit, sitting by the door?

What if your brother stopped by from time to time?

What if you were able to wave to your grandmother from the window?

It was the last option: the window. As soon as grandmother left us at our respective classes, the teachers would immediately take me to the window. One of them would lift me up to look out so I could wave to grandmother before she departed.

Grandmother sailed away back home as I waved from an island. Feeling dwarfed in some strange teacher’s hands, I became a nameless one in someone else’s poem.

 


I once wrote a terrible poem about my brother: how he would hang out in our garage while I played punk music with our friends. The music loud and fast, one song quickly following another until hours had passed and everyone had to go home. The terrible poem mentioned a time my brother fell asleep as we played and how impossible it seemed, with everyone else’s ears ringing. I guess he had grown used to the sound after so many days, months, years. Our senses start to accept the disastrous levels, gloss over them, no matter how deafening.

After I graduated college, I had trouble finding a job. I ended up working at a donut shop owned by my ex-partner’s family. We had recently broken up. On the first day, the smell of sugar overwhelmed me; I remember how quickly my head began to spin. But as the days followed, the scent fell away, and my mind glossed over the intensity of sugar. Once, as I drove away from the factory in the middle of the night to deliver trays and trays of donuts, I thought about how my brother had fallen asleep as we played punk music and how what I needed now was wakefulness. All I could think to do was turn up the music and hope I did not succumb to the noise as he had.

 


The fisherman has left or the fisherman is gone. In either case, neither is here.

Did my brother leave or did I? He moved to the other side of the country but returned after a year. By then I had moved away. Then he moved again. Both of us for good, or for now. But before all that, the summer before he left for Rhode Island, we went cliff jumping.

Water is the only reprieve in the desert heat. My brother used to drive me, our younger brother, and our cousin and friends to the Colorado River. We would shuffle along eroding cliffs, navigating past yucca, creosote, trash dumps, and endless scatterings of broken glass. If you slipped you could fall off the cliff. If you slipped you could get cut.

That one day, after some discussion and a little reconnaissance to make sure we didn’t leap into a shallow area and break our necks, everyone jumped. Except me, who hung back, shaking at the edge. My twin brother called up to me. He said the obvious: everyone has gone.

On the ledge, I thought about the window where I’d wave to my grandmother during those first moments of class. Even now, whenever we pass the school, my grandmother points it out, reminding me: Martin, mira. Our window. She would wave to me from her car, as my brother waved to me from the river that summer before he left: jump.

On the summit, I decided to jump, second guessed myself at the last moment, hugged the wall. My brother would tell me later how scared he was looking up at me, knowing he could do nothing, knowing all the possible ways it could have gone.  

There are two translations of what happened next.

In one version, I jumped. Joined everyone. Felt immediate relief in the water with my family and friends. Glad to no longer be on the summit alone.

In another version, I didn’t jump. I stayed, am still here. I watch how the light catches the water, catches the broken glass, gives off a shimmer, reminds me how much I don’t want to fall.

 


In the book with the fisherman’s poem(s), there are two translations of another poem. I remembered a line from the first translation as in every direction, and from the other: in each direction. Looking again, though, I see the line in each direction appears nowhere; both translations contain the phrase in every direction. I wrote pages on the distinction between each and every, but catching my error, I decided to remove every instance of each, each appearance of every.

I forget what I wrote about these words. I could open an earlier version of this piece. I never delete sentences. I simply move them to a different page or create a new document. I save them with the understanding that I might visit them again if I ever change my mind.

Sometimes I look through the files hoping to steal from them, a quick line I once abandoned. It’s rare to find something worth taking.

Other times, I don’t open the old files, I simply look at the long list of file names. Thinking about all the possible directions each piece of writing took, all the possible directions I steered away from.

 



I have drifted too far from islands. I knew I would when I set the different translations side by side and could not help but think of twins, the two that were one. I meant to write about how poetry is used to claim land. What a claim does to a poem. I wanted to write about dispute. Instead, I have recited the lines, created new translations through misreading, or worse, erased segments to fit into an argument that has traveled beyond me. Has run away as words often do.

 


When we were in kindergarten, my brother and I were separated by a door. Though I never did, I could have opened it, I suppose, and found him there. Now we are separated by more than a door, but it has shifted, has become less overwhelming than that first distance, less absolute than that day at Donut World, a place I never returned to after writing that first poem.

My twin brother recently visited our grandmother’s old house. She moved closer to my brother a few months ago, but her house is our childhood home, and he wanted to show it to his children before it was sold. He asked if I wanted to wake up early with them, drive there together in the morning. We could stop by the elementary school to see your window, he says—the one you shared with grandmother—we could reminisce about our school days, tell my children stories of all those mornings and afternoons at grandmother’s house.

But I had plans, and when I told him I couldn’t go, he wasn’t upset. He knew how often I’d been there to help our grandmother pack. We agreed to meet up that night for dinner. He would fly home the following day.

The house is still there, and yet isn’t because I can no longer visit. Or I could—the house hasn’t sold yet—but it would be empty in every sense. Grandmother and all her things have upped and left, leaving the place uninhabited; I would be a ghost there, in a house that is not a summit.

Was the man in Qi Kun’s poem, the one who was tiny on top, waving? Was his gesture signaling farewell or calling for help? Was he flailing his arms on the summit, pleading to those on the boat, come back, do not leave, I am still there (here), still theory, as the vessel moved farther away, or was he simply noting the separation between himself and those who’d left? Waves are interpretations. From those who witness them at a distance ever growing.

How many times have we waved goodbye, when really we meant come back?