It was after midnight Saturday. I was on the second leg of making it crosstown, having climbed up Manhattan from Astor Place to Grand Central, all just to eventually get downtown again on the 2 train to go home. Thankfully the 7 was not subject to all those runarounds the MTA calls a weekend schedule. The platform held a few people. In that hour of the night, we were all anonymous. Tired inward eyes, slow circular pacing, faraway minds. To each his own. It was 1 a.m. Even the train sounded tired when it finally came. Blindly, we shuffled on. My eyes blankly swept across the car, mostly black faces, one young white couple. Some people were sleeping. In my lap the book fell open,
"M.I.A." --by Bao-Long Chu
When you come back,
don't bother to
go to Cho Lon.
I am not there
among mangoes
I once peddled.
I am here now:
America.
Yes, I wait still.
Still, as Buddha.
I wake early
daily to make
you lotus soup
you love, thinking
you will today
break down this house
when you come back
and find me, love
breaking, broken
into ashes.
The green seas stretch
but they're not end-
less. If you are
lost, please follow
my skin, my faith.
I burn nightly.
... Something in me crumbled. Perhaps it was due to the deep hour of the night, when serious questions arise but you are too tired to have defenses. Perhaps it was the lulling rocking of the subway car, rocking my mind to other places, letting me touch the mangos, witness faith, witness death, feel how at once urgent and hopeless love is. Whatever it was, I fell into the poem at that moment, in that way where you feel both found and lost at the same time. Somebody had lost someone in a war, but there was waiting, habits, continuity, faith. When you come back, your lotus soup, break down this house. Times have changed, I am no longer where I was but come find me, here is where I will be. Come.
The subway car rocked on. I watched my companions doze off on each other's shoulders. You will today break down this house when you come back. Come back.
I am no longer where I was.
The poetry soaked in my brain, yanking back cells previously occupied by age's worries. It had been a while since a poem so simply moved me. Sure, I had read other poems which had stopped me in my tracks, but my feeling toward them was usually of admiration. Such poems I clump into the category of, say, "Blackberry Picking" by Seamus Heaney. Poems whose topics are a foreign world to me (blackberry picking), with terms I know not how to make sense of and must blindly accept (pea tins, jam-pots, briars). You know, one of those "advanced" poems you learn to appreciate in college, especially if you study in New England. Certainly I appreciate "Blackberry Picking" in an analytical way, but to me that's as far as it could go. I do not know exactly what a jam-pot is, having never laid hands on one or carried one in August to fill with blackberries. Without this sense of memory, the poem cannot move me. Because that is not my life. I can only appreciate its rhythm, its color, its diction.
This other poem, however, gently undid my consciousness with simple words. Memories seeped through. Not particular memories of particular incidents, but just senses, emotions, the way it felt in another time, another place, ten years ago, yesterday, when I was someone else. As I grew from Saigon to southern California to Cambridge to NYC, from six year old to adolescence to ivy winters to employment and real life, each world has felt as if another continent, each home is a separate realm of thoughts and possibilities, each self a stranger to the previous. And yet I am also never quite able to forget that previous iteration, there is always a yearning to reconnect. This yearning can be hard to fulfill because if you learn to write in one setting, a new world can seem a lot to process. Possibly that world tells you your writing is not suitable for this life at all, that it is a remnant from your old life in that other place. Then the oceans feel immense, the task of making your self and your context comprehensible is daunting and endless. And you stop writing, there is too much.
But thankfully, what remains is your emotions, your capacity to respond unconsciously, pre-consciously to the things that move you. The right poem, at midnight, on the 2 train downtown.
"The green seas stretch
but they're not end-
less. If you are
lost, please follow
my skin, my faith."
To me that means so many things.
