let footfalls cut to their holdings.
Tula
The linnet will be singing.
A man will awaken on his deathbed,
not yet cured.
—LARRY LEVIS
Blood stranger,
we never met: you died so far away
that here the moment
hasn’t passed.
An alien moon
rises. Hearing
birdsong in the forests of the dead
you pin it
in your mind’s ear:
my inheritance
redacted
to a prosody; by flow & respiration
stripped to contour,
archipelago.
Even your last wordless sounds
are of that music my mother
grieved in:
I want
to kiss you, to understand,
but I have no body—
The Poet’s Mother at Eleven, Killing a Chicken
As for the bird, its pedigree
was impeccable: rose-combed & indigenous
cockfighting in its blood. My grandfather had folded
its ancestor under his arm
in a bolt of jute & the boxcar dark. He was young
& bound for the provinces, fleeing
with his bride the rifled
capital, the Arisaka Type 99, its stock
chrysanthemum-stamped, the blade
jabbed half-jokingly into my grandmother’s
stomach: swollen the private thought
not with limbs but a stash.
Dowry; doubloons; maybe
even meat. In the clatter & sway
the hen held its tongue, producing
eggs but no epiphanies
although the flesh of its forebears had delighted
the palates of missionaries, good-
intentioned Baptists in the wake of cholera
& reconcentration: nation builders; tenderfoots;
virgins still wet with honeysuckle & whitewash.
Who brought among other things home
economics, so that fifty years later my mother
would have to corner
& seize it. Wring its wattled links.
Pluck it & gut it & waste
nothing.
Tula
An immigrant’s son
I have ears like the blind.
Music comes easily;
night frightens me.
Home late from the hospital, she comes to my door—
I fake sleep.
She sings a soothing song
in the language I never learned:
prayers against rain.
Catalog of mythic birds.
As many names for music
as English has for theft.
Using them I invent
a country with only two citizens.
The word I choose for mother
sounds like the one for dream.
Notation
Her singing—sight-reading—while we
were supposed to be sleeping.
Dad downtown in a tower
& thrum of the graveyard shift.
Her piano: even pianissimo
throbbed the snow-muffled rambler.
Hymns that taught what the word is: a spell
for collapsing distances. And folk songs,
her forte, a rep rehearsed for classmates
who sometimes passed through:
they’d belt them out together,
flower prints crowding the upright.
Afterward cackling in her language:
uncrackable, although I thought I caught
the upshot: why here, in this white cold
& quiet? As if winter could cure a childhood
of cholera & typhoons. Her hand:
she transcribed my favorite melodies
as
