The last book in the "Plum Flower Trilogy" series, "The City of Eternal Spring" contains poems that reflect the poet's embrace of Chinese culture and his travels to China.
Archaeology of Time: the Past
In Taiwan a book spoke to me in a bookstore with words I did not know, a book with a white cover to hold photographs of families I might have forgotten, people from this world where words are not made of letters like tools or nuts and bolts but of tiny pictures, histories.
I paid for the book with lives I do not remember, handed a fee over to someone bigger than the haunting that flew me here to where I live in a tomorrow that never lets yesterday touch what has not happened, a tomorrow I do not want my black family of my blood to ever know.
The book shows me new families, Chinese people pulled into sameness of another shared blood, people accepted, adopted, the way I am adopting this side of time to make what makes tribes, generations, cities, angry shouts, wars, love between sheets that hold secrets of who we sleep with.
When the book is open, I have no regrets of family, no wish to make the past disappear. I am free to choose the possible here in my own tomorrow, twelve thousand miles from horrors, from what I used to know to what I can choose to remember, lives I might have lived with all of my necessary secrets.
It is no secret that one day I will go back to yesterday, my son meeting me at Logan, the airport with a cowboy name from a western film where men are violent saints with guns. With his video camera my son captures the father who left him, who is now back to make peace with what we call the past.
Archaeology of Time: Gambling
On a boat bound for Macau, uncle with his second wife stood confident,
the tables waiting for him, his sure hands, one on his wife’s smile in his heart, one
slidng back across the smooth cloth to the cards. The war was far away
in places where battle sounds surrendered to ordinary pleasures, sex and the chance,
the gambler’s chance to break through to where a win is guaranteed, but chance
is a drug, and the sure thing takes away the thrilll of losing everything, falling.
How much of this I remember, how much I know is about the chance of being born
to a life in a city of shipyards and mills, sailors, workers with days off from life,
a good uncle who took me to Pimlico, with the Preakness ground in the smell
of tickets torn up, thrown to the ground, light flashing and breaking in the panes
of the grandstands, my uncle grounding me in the wisdom of men the way I sat
on a plane remembering three wives, bound for Macau, China ripping open,
a heart torn by its own envy in mirrors, hiding a royal flush, hearts in the blinds.
Archaeology of Time
Mother cried to think I would love a woman she could not talk to, a woman
with Cantonese all over the dresses she said were the best from Hong Kong,
Mother sneering, pulling her tongue back on the Mandarin way of saying cheap,
cheap cloth, cheap woman for her son, the kind prince to be lord of the family,
and she took to her bed, feigning death threatening to join the ancestors, convince
them all to pull their blessings back until her one good son came to his good senses,
came to understand his station above where this woman was born, where she
will always be, so constant is the will of women who bring sons into the world
with a love that commands, that issues the future across the currents of history,
so the Immortals remind us birth and death are one thing, unlike love with its stations.
In this life, black me with my black mother crying to think her prince was casting pearls
across a sea of the unworthy people, folk who could not do what I could do,
break light or leap across the pages of time and build disaster into fortune, and back
again with a self fulfilling mind she gave me one evening when her water broke
and she saw the gate where birth and death, are the wide gate, a shimmering silence.
Archaeology of Time: Convertibles
Head thrown back, convertible top down, radio blasting Louis Armstrong,
driving into Shenyang City, the girls one smile across the sky, Shenyang
fading into Nashville, Put a little sugar in my bowl, come on, be sweet
in Mandarin, like money on the tongue, money foreigners bring from whiteness
to trouble the blues veil in Mississippi, stories we forget on the road at night
with stars that say they will keep pain away, mark the road with spirits to march
sadness off into the woods and snuff it out, O Jesus, why did you leave Buddha
in the market haggling with women selling the whole cloth of the end of the world,
cloth we tear to shreds to weave again into the mesh of black and yellow, a pale
messiah of flat fifths, fingers tapping pulling our skin over oceans to save it.
"Radio blasing Louis Armstrong, driving into Shenyang City."
