Ocean Vuong

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/04/someday-ill-love-ocean-vuong

Someday I’ll love Ocean Vuong

Ocean, don’t be afraid.
The end of the road is so far ahead
it is already behind us.
Don’t worry. Your father is only your father
until one of you forgets. Like how the spine
won’t remember its wings
no matter how many times our knees
kiss the pavement. Ocean,
are you listening? The most beautiful part
of your body is wherever
your mother’s shadow falls.
Here’s the house with childhood
whittled down to a single red tripwire.
Don’t worry. Just call it horizon
& you’ll never reach it.
Here’s today. Jump. I promise it’s not
a lifeboat. Here’s the man
whose arms are wide enough to gather
your leaving. & here the moment,
just after the lights go out, when you can still see
the faint torch between his legs.
How you use it again & again
to find your own hands.
You asked for a second chance
& are given a mouth to empty into.
Don’t be afraid, the gunfire
is only the sound of people
trying to live a little longer. Ocean. Ocean,
get up. The most beautiful part of your body
is where it’s headed. & remember,
loneliness is still time spent
with the world. Here’s
the room with everyone in it.
Your dead friends passing
through you like wind
through a wind chime. Here’s a desk
with the gimp leg & a brick
to make it last. Yes, here’s a room
so warm & blood-close,
I swear, you will wake—
& mistake these walls
for skin.

Daily Bread

                      April 2017

                  Cú Chi, Vietnam

  Red is only black remembering.
Early dark & the baker wakes
to press what’s left of the year
into flour & water. Or rather,
he’s reshaping the curve of her pale calf
atmosphered by a landmine left over
from the war he can’t recall. A fistful
of hay & the oven scarlets. Alfafa.
Forsythia. Foxglove. Bubbling
dough. When it’s done, he’ll tear open
the yeasty steam only to find
his palms – the same
as when he was young. When heaviness
was not measured by weight
but distance. He’ll climb
the spiral staircase & call her name.
He’ll imagine the softness of bread
as he peels back the wool blanket, raises
her phantom limb to his lips as each kiss
dissolves down her air – light ankles.
& he will never see the pleasure
this brings to her face. Never
her face. Because in my hurry
to make her real, make her
here, I will forget to write
a bit of light into the room.
Because my hands were always brief
& dim as my father’s.
& it will start to rain. I won’t
even think to put a roof over the house –
her prosthetic leg on the nightstand,
the clack clack as it fills to the brim. Listen,
the year is gone. I know
nothing of my country. I write things
down. I build a life & tear it apart
& the sun keeps shining. Crescent
wave. Salt-spray. Tsunami. I have
enough ink to give you the sea
but not the ships, but it’s my book
& I’ll say anything just to stay inside
this skin. Sassafras. Douglas fir.
Sextant & compass. Let’s call this autumn
where my father sits in a $40 motel
outside Fresno, rattling from the whiskey
again. His fingers blurred
like a photograph. Marvin on the stereo
pleading brother, brother. & how
could I have known, that by pressing
this pen to paper, I was touching us
back from extinction? That we were more
than black ink on the bone-
white backs of angels facedown
in the blazing orchard. Ink poured
into the shape of a woman’s calf. A woman
I could go back & erase & erase
but I won’t. I won’t tell you how
the mouth will never be honest
as its teeth. How this
bread, daily broken, dipped
in honey – & lifted
with exodus tongues, like any other
lie – is only true as your trust
in hunger. How my father, all famine
& fissure, will wake at 4 a.m.
in a windowless room & not remember
his legs. Go head, baby, he will say, put yor han
on mai bak, because he will believe
I am really there, that his son
has been standing behind him all
these years. Put yor hans on mai showduh,
he will say to the cigarette smoke swirling
into the ghost of a boy, Now flap. Yeah, lye dat, baby.
Flap lye yu waving gootbai. See?
I telling you…I telling yu. Yor daddy?
He fly.
 

Queen Under the Hill
I approach a field. A black piano waits
at its center. I kneel to play
what I can. A single key. A tooth
tossed down a well. My fingers
sliding the slimy gums. Slick lips. Snout. Not
a piano—but a mare
draped in a black sheet. White mouth
sticking out like a fist. I kneel
at my beast. The sheet sunken
at her ribs. A dented piano
where rain, collected
from the night, reflects
a blue sky fallen
into the side of a horse. Blue
thumbprint pressed
from above. As if something needed
to be snuffed out, leaving
this black blossom dropped
on a field where I am only
a visitor. A word exiled
from the prayer, flickering. Wind
streaks the pale grass flat
around us—the horse & I
a watercolor hung too soon
& dripping. Green waves
surround this black rock
where I sit turning bones
to sonatas. Fingers blurred,
I play what I know
from listening to orchards
unleash their sweetest
wrongs. The dent in this
horse wide enough to live
by. Puddle of sky
on earth. As if to look down
on the dead is to look up
at my own face, trampled
by music. If I lift the sheet
I will reveal the heart huge
as a stillbirth. If I lift the sheet
I will sleep beside her
as a four-legged shadow, hoof homed
to hoof. If I close my eyes
I’m inside the piano again
& only. If I close my eyes
no one can hurt me.

Thanksgiving 2006

Brooklyn's too cold tonight
& all my friends are three years away.
My mother said that I could be anything
I wanted -- but I chose to live.
On the stoop of an old brownstone
a cigarette flares, then fades.
I walk to it: a razor
sharpened with silence.
His jawline etched in smoke.
The mouth where I reenter
this city. Stranger, palpable
echo, here is my hand, filled with blood thin
as a widow's tears. I am ready.
I am ready to be every animal
you leave behind.

To My Father / To My Unborn Son

The stars are not hereditary. —Emily Dickinson

There was a door & then a door

surrounded by a forest.

Look, my eyes are not

your eyes.

You move through me like rain heard

from another country.

Yes, you have a country.

Someday, they will find it

while searching for lost ships . . .

Once, I fell in love

during a slow-motion car crash.

We looked so peaceful, the cigarette floating from his lips

as our heads whip-lashed back

into the dream & all

was forgiven.

Because what you heard, or will hear, is true: I wrote

a better world onto the page

& watched the fire take it back.

Something was always burning.

Do you understand? I closed my mouth

but could still taste the ash

because my eyes were open.

From men, I learned to praise the thickness of walls.

From women,

I learned to praise.

If you are given my body, put it down.

If you are given anything

be sure to leave no tracks in the snow.

Know that I never chose

which way the seasons turned. That it was always October

in my throat.

& you: every leaf

refusing to rust.

Quick. Can you see the red dark shifting?

This means I am touching you. This means

you are not alone—even

as you are not.

If you get there before me, if you think

of nothing

& my face appears rippling

like a torn flag—turn back.

Turn back & find the book

I left us, filled

with all the colors of the sky

forgotten by gravediggers.

Use it. Use it to prove how the stars

were always what we believed

they were: the exit-wounds

of every

misfired word.

Headfirst 

Khong co gi bang com voi ca.
Khong co gi bang ma voi con.
Vietnamese Proverb
“Nothing can compare to rice and fish/ Nothing can compare to a mother and her child” 

Don't you know? A mother's love
                   neglects pride
              the way fire
neglects the cries
       of what it burns. My son,
                             even tomorrow
you will have today. Don't you know?
                      There are men who touch breasts
                            as they would
        the tops of skulls. Men
who carry dreams
       over mountains, the dead
                             on their backs.
But only a mother can walk
                     with the weight
of a second beating heart.
                            Stupid boy.
        You can get lost in every book
but you'll never forget yourself
                        the way god forgets
his hands.
                When they ask you
                      where you're from,
tell them your name
        was fleshed from the toothless mouth
                              of a war-woman.
That you were not born
              but crawled, headfirst––
into the hunger of dogs. My son, tell them
                      the body is a blade that sharpens
         by cutting.