Brief History of Exile
Now when the wind comes, I lean into it.
I’m learning to be that pure, relinquish or carry without
seeming to.
The things in my life
I remember with perfect clarity:
testing a pearl against the grit of my teeth,
bitter, rasped,
as I was taught; the flushed laughter
echoing between brothers
like a broken chord split between two hands;
hail darkening the corrugated blue of
a bicycle shed; the corona of the little lamp
in whose tired light sat a woman who didn’t want me,
as I was taught,
her back dim, repeated,
framed by shelves filled with books I’d forget
how to read.
Of course, this was long ago
in another country. And always there was the sea, approaching
before receding, and the stillness
that preceded entering. Years passed
before I understood it wasn’t a portrait to be finished,
perfected. It was a weight to be carried
when living, as I once did, in a town between two graves.
*
The town where I grew up does not exist.
The man who marched and starved to get there
does not exist, though he once believed
labor is grace and the room of his anger held a stillness
like a specimen kept under glass. Now
the book of his life has turned clear:
explosive little vowels, a spray of honeysuckle,
the afterimage of the night sky burning
from his room by the bridge, the tanks and young men
riding into the city square at last…
How much of a face is the memory
of that face? How much of hunger is
the memory of eating dirt, bark, his one leather belt? Until
the town is full of nothing,
a place where people avoid speaking
of what’s passed.
They press together, sea and mountain of dark crowns,
a cry and its counterpoint,
and the sky there needs no translation.
*
In the half-light of childhood
remembered in photographs, I lived in towns
not far from here, walked the bored streets
and tried to add nothing,
wanting to be different
from nothing: asphalt, stone, the sweetness
of names like Amy and Julia that bloomed
and then grew heavy,
—and it is easy, from here,
to see the aspect was always degradation.
Restless town, mute town, town repeating
its forgotten directions.
Town where traffic winds like a persistent memory
and parking lots span the years like black lungs.
The town where I was borned
was a lonely town, where Julia, blonde Julia, sneered,
Who wrote borned?
Of myself
I thought I could live anywhere
because I’ve always hated your town:
the weight was a peace I entered, waiting in the dim light
at the end of world
where I could see the gleam of another
town where I had not been at all: muted streets
through successive winters, sky yellowing
as desert sand gusted through and women
wrapping scarves around their mouths, and your
smallish fear on the back of the bicycle
as she turned, saying in a lowered voice
the warning, mei you hao guo zi che, diaphanous red across
her mouth, a phrase so plainly hers in those years
it’s time travel just to remember it.
You don’t know if you meant to remember
but it’s stayed with you like a soft refrain.
Something was wrong. Something lay dormant,
slept when you slept and sprang when you woke.
*
Walk in the direction of the stillness.
What’s in these fields?
He sat lower, feeling
some of his smallness returned to him.
There wasn’t much to dream of.
The river was faded
and the smog a gracelessness burning the throat.
I can’t see my city,
he might have thought. To have arrived
is not enough.
Cicada carapace on willow trees,
digging for nymphs to eat, where was that?
Teaching himself to play the erhu, was that still somewhere?
That bird he’d bought for his father as a joke, trained to repeat
a couple political slogans, was it some place or no place?
The humiliation they didn’t yet know
was possible but grew used to within a lifetime, where was it?
The gray sky shifted among its moods. Suppose he thought,
I can’t see my city,
the town of running dogs, where people
empty, break
not bend—where his father, his brother, a whole town
still waited, waited to be thought of
with some tenderness.
Over a wooden table, two brothers divided
what they had left of their father’s anger and grace. The older one
drank on and on until he stopped—became
cut silk, bits of pearl—and the other one took over, drank as if
a cry of pitilessness were at the end of the glass,
gathering and gaining
until it fell.
The sky did not fall. Between them now
they will always have the sea,
and the music that precedes entering,
and the water wide, unable to concede
any argument.
*
All day I felt the reproach
of the years, of forgotten words
dissolving, sugar on the tongue.
In the terrible raiment of childhood,
I tried to sit lower than myself
and looked to the sky, which returned no one.
Neither did its counterpoint, the sea.
Light lifts and it is
as if the world starts anew.
*
Near burning,
the night is a constellation of flies.
What forces blew through
had to learn again what rapture meant, to stand beside
one’s past rising as smoke:
the kneeled one, the ill at heart, the one
who’s been marching so long he forgets his own fate.
They are each being taught
how to be alone.
In black and white portraits of the dead
they see laughter finally emptied of everything.
It’s fine to keep thinking this way.
Hardheaded and soft-headed
are both ways of being stupid.
Beneath the afterimage
of towns, the birch trees were bored,
their leaves like hands pressed together
admitted nothing,
taken over part by part
by waves of the cicadas’ shuddering song, jaundiced
streetlights illuminated what was scarcely there, the ugliness of the scene held
my head like a calyx, and the corolla, whose corollary
is language, ignited—
and memory, which is no color,
hung in the air like ash.