K. C. Wang, 1921-1959
I am your first forgiver, liar
who said you would outwait
us all, being Chinese, and fit
with careful ancestors.
Now in the stucco house that stands
for church, your yellow kin
sit hushed and hot as at your wedding
and your two worlds fold hands
here, where the voiceless cornfields clack
in middle west September.
We rise to say the astringent prayers
and sweat runs down my back
and paints your
sunburned rosy wife
while the boyish minister
does what he can, quoting from Schweitzer’s “reverence for life”.
Improbable and tragic, see us pray:
twelve years and two black-eyed children later,
your light gone out, good fisherman and father,
we burn your shell up on your wedding day.
Two noons ago in Boston
I came home to find the wire
that Western Union will not phone
hung on the doorknob, like a flier
or notice of the pox,
spelling that you had died at midnight
in your tallest year, the clock
unstopped and time still running right;
that in some misdated zone,
silent and self-confident,
had closed in sleep without a sign,
and all your good seed spent.
Two days your son has gone to the St. Jo River,
wearing your clever knife, your special pack,
and caught more carp than you could catch together.
He goes each day to hook his father back.
Woods Hole, in 1946
we stank of fish. Before
your wedding and just after ours,
you came weekends to mix
the soy sauce with the whiskey in
our funny rooms that sat
on sticks over the reeking inlet
and slept in our kitchen.
We caught puffers off the wharf.
You stunned them with an oar
before they burst themselves in air
and shucked the thick skin off
with that knife, then. In China, once,
you said you hooked this fish,
and flat squid and sea robin, much
the same. Our continents
swam into one, awash in a brand-new
war’s end, and all of us saved whole to get
children, mortgages, Ph.D.s, in debt,
a bear by the tail. And we had a world to do.
Well, all of us have one
dead friend. I make you mine, K.C.
who loved our outland ways: chopped chicken
liver, lox and black bread, liturgies
sung through the nose, and soft as muslin;
our old lop-eared menorah
because you held one in Tientsin,
the membrane scrolls of Torah
because your books rolled, too;
the bowlegged Hebrew alphabet
you squinted at and would redo
as symbols that you learned to paint
in childhood. I make you mine who rode
our babies on your back and taught them words
in your first tongue; whose own younglings crowed
in our playpen, two moon-eyed hybrid birds.
Now you are ash and chips of bone
and your maimed wife lies down alone
and there is only left to curse
the random clock of universe,
I walk to your river that abuts
the thirsty fields, and in its guts
at sunset see the bulbous carp
come up to feed, pumping their lips
over the water bugs, each sent
to serve each in its element:
strange air and stranger wet, and you
cleaned out by fire, are still true.
Alien, citizen, prince, butt-end
of all you built, my one dead friend.
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