Alphabet
a
Down the lazy slope of a small valley I drive, distracted by the flatness of white sky ahead. To offer my prayer I ask meekly for your voice.
b
What I want most is return. Yet I know bliss cannot be sought. It simply comes. It comes, and I return to the clear river of lucidity between forget and remember. I am held by a chorus of silence. It is the reason I have to speak. To hear your voice with mine and not know the difference.
c
In my first cup of coffee I discover grace forgotten. Down the lazy slope of a small valley I drive and become the world for the first time. The world is a silver necklace, I watch you trace the chain like an echo as we wait for the train. I left the city of trains for a country of highways. The clouds slowly depart, the good ones linger, and color returns to the earth. Sing in unison.
A swarm of sirens rush by. I sit in the middle of the street, wondering what will knock me down. And where. And how. But nothing hits me. One headlight squeals off my shoulder, peeling the outer layer of skin clean off. Feels how I’d imagine a shooting star would feel if it licked me on its way down. Life wants me alive. Some days I wake up knowing I’ll be lucky. Once the red lights flash out of view a green Prius brakes right in front of me. I watch a precarious stack of books and tapes tumble down from how hard the driver slams it, a dull cascade of thumps barely audible over the traffic and the car groans. A thin guy in enormous orange sweatpants gets out. “Hey!” Hey yourself. “Get in!” No! I start running. He pulls me back with a sweaty hand around my wrist, whirling me around. It’s Lucy’s ex boyfriend. Fuck off. I glare at him. He lets go of my wrist one finger at a time. Shaking his head and mouthing something silently to himself, he gets back in the driver’s seat. Suddenly there’s no other cars on the road.
It’s getting late, so I walk back to my porch. Nothing every happens to me. Nothing… ever… I sing to myself, a tuneless song. Full moon tonight. Once that meant something. In the moon’s fullness I felt the reassurance of love – love for humanity – all of it – the tender blue bruise poking at itself so it throbs with the pulse of the earth, whirling to the same tuneless melody each of us hums alone without ever realizing. It’s different tonight. In the moon I catch the evil eye of God. That’s the thing they never tell you. The purest love is indifferent to humanity. It’s the love of a roach secreting nectar off its hard amber back, waiting for the other to draw near. Have you ever seen roaches fucking? It’s the only thing the moon cares to watch. As for God, I can wait no longer. I look down at the dirt, where the bamboo shoots and green onions in my neighbor’s garden fidget discreetly. Tomorrow my neighbor will come down in his wifebeater and cut a stalk to use in a slow braised oxtail stew. He will beat his son then cook for him. They will eat side by side in silence. After his son goes to bed, the man will weep in his heart, fumbling towards gentleness without knowing what it is. The son will dream of bony fish marinating in brine. His father, eyes milky, blinded by cataracts, plucks them one by one from the sour sap with precision. In the years that follow, everything he dreams will come true.
Maria
Noon. The angels leave their posts for lunch. The sun, it yawns, and the clouds swim out from the sea toward the desert mountains. What day is it? Monday. Maria walks down Sunset, looking for the perfect leaf. Over her black dress she wears her new green wool vest and her roommate’s cowboy boots, one size too big. So she walks slowly and doesn’t notice the woman in the cafe staring, embarrassed and adoring. Falling in love with strangers! Those of us who indulge know too well that gulf between looking and wanting. I love you, the woman says with her dark sleepy eyes. I love you, good bye. Maria picks a leaf off a branch and presses it to her palm. She stands on the street and examines it awhile. The angels return. Maria walks home, eats lunch, and glues the leaf in her notebook.
24
In the night i wait
for stillness (the low hum
of love before molecules; yawning & dancing)
and thank god nothing is still.
Love eats my gaze leaping through darkestness
holy hollow whole & humble eyes clear
In the night (smiling without mouth & winking
without eyes) i wait. (입없이 눈없이)
for stillness (a little tired a little sad:
moved by the shaky yes of time, endless and)
now (yes) i conjure
new freckles (drum cheeks)
new curls (droop sleepy past neck)
new knuckles (red rough desert winter)
and thank g-d
you are far from me
you are never far from my mind
(take my hand)
In the night i
walk and (fists full heart open to
the crows) i (scatter myself and) wait
for morning. (the moon rolls out of bed)
Ghost Writing
In the red desert lived a monk named Philotheos. For most of his life he wandered, he prayed, he watched for light. He lived sometime between the ninth and tenth centuries. The only reason we know he lived is because he wrote. What is left of Philotheos is one work, less than 7000 words long, titled, ‘Forty Texts on Watchfulness.’ The central tenet of these texts is this: those who desire God must ceaselessly watch his light until they become light itself. Until light is all there is. To demonstrate the effects of divine light, Philotheos conceived the term, phôteinographesithai, the first prototype of the word we know today as ‘photograph.’ Light writing.
The Greek root ‘photo-’ evolved from another Greek word, ‘phōs,’ which evolved from the proto-Indo-European root “bha-,” which means “to shine.” For thousands of years humans linked the concept of light to that of the spirit, holy ghosts. It should come as no surprise, then, that the inventor of the word ‘photograph’ was a light-obsessed, god-loving monk who lived and died nearly a thousand years before the chemical process of photography was invented.
—
In the memory, my mother cries in my grandmother’s bedroom. The door is closed, and I am on the other side. I am in the hallway, listening. Because my mother is crying, I know she is looking at pictures of her father. He died when I was four. I don’t remember what he looks like. I only remember his hands, long and wrinkled, wrapped around my stomach as I sat in his lap. I think of those hands as I listen to my mother sniff and sigh with a wet voice. Once in a while a low sob escapes, or a shuddering moan, and I have to fight the urge to open the door, to hold her close to me. I have never felt grief before but I know it is something that makes you alone, makes you want to be alone. That is how my mother described it to me.
In another memory, an earlier one, I open the door and she is sitting on the floor next to my grandmother’s bed. By her knees are three photo albums, scattered around the floor. Her fingers are trembling, clutching a photograph of my grandfather. At the sound of the door she whirls around, pressing the photograph to her chest so I cannot see.
She says, “What is it, baby.” Not a question, a warning.
I want to comfort her. Instead I say, “Can I see the photo?” My mother’s eyes well with fresh tears; she shakes her head as if someone is trying to force-feed her a strange vegetable.
“It wouldn’t mean anything to you,” she says and asks me to close the door.
Later that day, or maybe the next, I creep into my grandmother’s bedroom. My mother is out with a friend from high school. My grandmother is in the living room watching daytime television. I tip-toe into her bedroom and close the door very slowly, silencing the usual click. I reach up, flipping on the light switch. I open her bottom dresser drawer. Inside are five photo albums and two shoeboxes. I lift up the cover to one of the shoeboxes; it is filled to the brim with photographs. Each photo has a little orange date pressed onto the bottom right corner. 89 11 04, 92 07 29… Most of the photos are of my grandmother, back when her hair was still black, not orange-brown dye. Near the bottom of the box are a few photos of my grandpa. He is standing on the right side of a road with green mountains in the background. He is tall and thin and unsmiling. The photo is taken from far away, and my grandpa’s eyes are black pins, shiny and dense. I do not know the man in this photo, and I feel nothing from looking at it. Still, I stare. I wish I knew which photo my mother held to her chest, which photo makes her cry the most. Perhaps if I knew I would feel something, too.
moksha
At night the flowers are ravenous
They want to eat me
(we awake waxen and pensive
rooted to the ground, hungry)
Last night I cried on his chest
like a creature a child I crawl mutely,
inconsolable, longing for the beating flesh
of a body larger than mine,
Tell me you love me,
Now a vengeful song
The old fantasy White
the color of bone
Picked clean
and the softness that follows death
and Clarice “I’ll stick out to the bitter end” Yes
my eyes my mouth my eyes open,
clean and smiling, emptied of guilt
rocking every moon, tender and
crumbling, my heart,
low and yellow,
gentle, gently annihilating
before you eat me
tell me you love me