I.

When I asked the man I love if there was water
in the south, he said no water—

but mourning his father, the mourners
were conceptual dancers, waving to grief.

II.

Sand like bleached saffron between us,
I watch him vanish into the earth, his father

like a newborn in his arms—
the white linen

his new skin.

I hold in my hand my other hand.
I tap the skin above my breasts

like some dry drum.

The wind hears nothing
but the coursing blood

of the son.

III.

In the south without water
the music of grief
like a greedy fish
swims in his ear.

What’s wrong with my small house? What’s wrong?
It has collapsed.

Women cluster,
sing the sun full
cycle. Like a rock dove,
their chorus rises.

You who are seabound, wearing what you must wear—
Your house is destroyed.

Someone has razed
his house, his house
which was his father.
By the life in my arms, I’ll build you another—
In the sky with a thousand rocks.

IV.

I do not see you when you climb down, in your two arms the body of your father. When you lift the skin off the ground, what do you see? What fabric is the bed of our fathers? In the words of women expert at making stones weep, the dead rest in a watery place. The minutes I am above ground and you below it are the ugliest of my life. Like the mourners I sway around a fixed point. When I see you again you are not wet, your arms are still your arms. The sea soaks only our fathers, I understand. I too am as dry as can be. Your mother refuses to leave before the sky itself is a dense shroud. You wait arched in the sun. Because I cannot touch you, I smell the insides of my hands. The smell is an egg, just cracked. Priests in saffron robes are dancing in my head. We learn to swim when we have to, this is what I’ve learned. Look how golden the ground. How loud the midday wind. How far the sea.

V.

Grief is an egg
at the bottom of the sea.

VI.

We live only three days, says the sheikh outside the tomb. On the first, we are born. (It is a warm noon for winter. Your cousins hand out plastic water bottles as we listen to the sheik. I want to give you mine.) On the second we die.

VII.

On the third we rise like rock doves from the ground.

I slept with my head in the corner,
above the shrub where the blackbird settled,
the rooks slowly kiting into the oaks,

summer dusk silting up like the river,
or autumn slits distilling into frost,
leaves alert to the first tinge of snow;

I felt her burred brown ruff, heard her decoy
like a fling of heat away from her bed,
her fluff underlipped by a cut of wind,

then the seamless nuzzle-in, gloved in hush,
the feathers easing like leaves, her presence
in me as light as her weight on the twig;

yet tensioned, ready, springy as a frog
—at a twinge, a pink pad, a prowl of shadow—
to cut loose, fling that shudder-stun, scatter-chaff call,

to undercut in a rush from the core,
a curve of light under the wing of the night
like a blade slashing a sucker off the rock.

Lying there, thinking seemed like a forest
shrinking back to the shrub, impressing my sense of her,
her last glance not the focus, but a beak

pulling a thread of thought into the oblique flight
that unraveled me, unmatted the gap
through which I fell leafily into sleep,

into the world before it dawned that was her call
already in the morning, the chop-chop
brush-and-scrub-up routine, an asperging

in my brain like rain shaken from bushes,
which freshened the sense of some day waking
to sun like her eyes startlingly risen,

the warm dark, like a memory, torn apart.

and I have never | wanted so instantly | so much
as to be this heterosexual | doctor who scoops
her chin | into his hand | as big | as my want to be | him when he says
You just don’t understand | how many women | have I whispered that to
my fear forced | to propel | words | I have always hated myself

if I was this famous fake doctor, I bet the network would sponsor my visa

wouldn’t it be wonderful to wake | & save | lives | that weren’t my own
to even say I want | to save lives & not | be asked: how why who why where why
I’d know where anyway | I’d spell out a city | & they’d jet me in
guest appearance | & after if | I chose to stay | because I could | do that
anyone could | if I asked nicely enough | me as doctor/president/nation
they’d just let me be | I would let myself | Oh, I would frame
all the women’s faces | sigh: you just don’t

understand | not because I was me | unsure | of what city I’d be |
in come summer | not because all women become
my mother’s face | I would never stop nursing
but because I was just | an asshole | who had slept
with too many women | O to be just an asshole!

Let’s be honest | I probably won’t be a star | but I promise I’ll settle
for the role | of that awkward BFF | armed with this accent a student blamed
for them failing last semester | me not too gay not | too brown | just enough
for the ratings to spike | ethnic they’d call me | in interviews where the director
shuffled her sheets | with pride to announce | we wanted it to be authentic no
we couldn’t | get a real doctor so we got a poet instead | aren’t they just as important?

The love of my life keeps | waking next to me | the on-screen doctor is a loud kisser
In a few days I’ll tell her | just like I told the love of my | life before her
I cannot do this | until I know | where I’ll be for the next five years at least
& she’ll say | is this because I keep falling asleep during your show | I won’t
Ask you to lower the volume again | please | stay | & I’ll say
You just don’t understand | when really | all I do is leave.

My father always gave fighters the first punch.

And he would take it, the fist to his nose,
before pinning them to the ground. He had to be pried

off the pummel each time like a pit bull.

Three guys, six arms, one double nelson, my father said
of the strength required to pry him off anyone

who fought him. He told me this while we fished
the day after Brandon bent over me, split open

my cheekbone with a cafeteria tray. The less I spoke
the madder he got. F-f-f-reak, Brandon said.

Fight back, my father told me, breathing deep,
left nostril flaring. The one thinner and concaved.

I wanted to be like him, a bulk chest that filled shirts,
a nose that showed I was stouthearted and tough.

I spent afternoons in the school gym working out
until I lay on the cold tile of shower stalls, hot water

stinging my reddening skin, washing away
metal splinters scarring my hands and fingers

still curled hours after I finished my sets.
Still, my body refused to grow, shirts hanging

off my frame like unhinged fishing line.
I’m trying, I said to my father’s hulking frame.

He stared at me, his beaten nose gargling back
phlegm, left nostril flexing for air.

Then, he pulled a fat grub from the bait cup.
Slid it onto the hook. Cast it out to the lake.

I walked to the other side of the bend
and knelt at the edge of the water,

ripples wrinkling my reflection,
my shiner shadowed and shimmering.

Looking at it no one would know I lost my fight.
And I realized my father could have lost his fights

all those years ago and I would never know.
His mangled nose said he was a man who wasn’t afraid

to fight and only men washed in this world’s dark water
walked out of the tide, ready to brawl.

after Tung Ming-Chin's “The Birth of a New Hero” (2008)

I.

It’s always 6am they come at you,
heavy with another dawn declared done.
Searchlight breaks into households
to stand in for the unabashed sun.

It’s time to cherry-pick, Hong Kong,
every ungodly overspill.

The rest of us
never wake up anew and newsless, often
superstitious about the arrival of words
to bring home who’s gone, that acute

quiet baked in our daily bread,
our bite-sized offering.

II.

Sometimes, we enter a room and forget
why we're there. Blanked out a few seconds,
we’re sent messages

down a corridor of contacts,
not quite returning the original room.

I couldn’t bring myself to dissuade you
from the birth of a hero, nor could I
bring myself to dispute

some notion of ‘life goes on’.
This is not the hour for costless nicety.

This is the hour to make room
for the honesty of palms,
tucking out of a sleepless blanket

to breathe warmth to a frozen face.