the startled screams from both our mouths,
the comic shuffle through sliding doors,
husband hooked on one arm,
jittering akimbo, son slung in the other,
an ornate fountain spurting purple
beneath fluorescent ER lights.
My head stitched up and all of us
in bed before sunrise, death’s
nearest pass (despite their fears)
had come as we careened our way downhill
in our clown car of misfortune,
my mother in the driver’s seat,
her right hand placing pressure on my skull,
her left gripped hard upon the wheel—
the story she now laughs about at parties
piling up around her like the snow
that fell that night, silently
and everywhere.
That Scar
Fourteen, with hollow, aching limbs
I fed my fingers past empty serving bowls
and plucked a cube of melon from my mother’s plate,
her fork cascading down to catch
my knuckle mid-retreat.
Had I been ten or twenty,
had my father been alive,
some innocence or indifference
would have gotten in the way
(civility and all its cobbled barricades).
Instead, that day, she dug down
on the clenched crown of my fist
until the tines began to puddle blood
and our brunch guests’ laughter
clotted to a glottal stop.
Our laughter lasted on—
bewildered, joyful, barely seamed
with spite—though I let go.
Eventually I must have
let the damn thing go.
Lunch
We snap out our chopsticks and talk about the weather. After a lull I start in about the Lake Vostok project in Antarctica and how it took them over twenty years to drill down to the surface of the lake, four thousand metres under the ice. That’s interesting, she says. Then the waiter arrives with our food. She mangles her California roll and I burn the roof of my mouth on my deep-fried tofu. Eventually she lays her chopsticks down across her bento box and tells me that her friend’s doing better, though the cancer is still killing her. She’s so skinny now but she bought herself a new wardrobe and can drive her car, so it’s not all that bad yet. That’s good to hear, I say. The lake is almost as large as Lake Ontario, I add, and it’s been trapped under ice for fifteen million years. Then we both say one or two things and somehow we end up talking about her parents, how her mom’s folks hated her father so much that he packed up the family and moved north to the mining town just to get away from that mess. The waiter comes around again with the green tea. Neither of us wants more, but we smile politely as he pours. Your dad would have liked the Lake Vostok project, I say. They set a record by drilling the world’s deepest ice core. That’s something, she says. The waiter brings the bill and she takes it before I get the chance. When he returns with the change it’s an awkward amount so I chip in a dollar for the tip. They fill the borehole with Freon and kerosene so it doesn’t freeze between drillings, almost sixty tons of the stuff so far. That doesn’t sound good, she says. No, I say, but they don’t think it will contaminate the lake because as soon as they break the surface, water will rush up the borehole and freeze, sealing out the chemicals. Well I hope so, she says, pulling on her jacket. On our way out we pass a table with a mother and three kids. All the kids have sticky rice in their hair or on their face but none of the four seems to mind. You should write a poem about that, she says. She’s never said anything like it before. About what, I ask. But she can’t hear me over the street noise and has already moved on to something else.
Speak When Illuminated
I lie in bed, await three knocks from my parents’ side
of our adjoining wall, one each for I, love, and you—
then I reply, with one more added on for too.
And only then we sleep.
I dream I’m in an elevator: an adult, poet,
stubble-cheeked. My father dead, expectedly.
My mother married once again and happy.
My own wife in our home, expectant.
Then the elevator sticks.
I root my fingers in the door. It doesn’t give.
I press the button, panic-red, attempting to call out—
to whom? Some maintenance guy? A telecom employee
in Chennai? Speak When Illuminated
reads the sign that doesn’t light.
To myself, I realize, my mind half waking
from the dream. I am my only rescue.
I stare into the bulb to make it shine.
My wife is out there waiting; my manuscripts
and friends. My mother and my father just outside.
Yes, even him.
My waking mind insists it cannot be. He’s too old
to have lasted out these years. No, he’s just behind
the wall, I say into myself. I’ll show you now.
I knock three times upon the metal door.
Four knocks ring back.
My waking mind falls silent, yields the floor.
I am not a child anymore.
A
