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Less a nip than gnaw, the way a goat, tethered, will ruminate a rope; the way each

Beyond the steady rock the steady sea, In movement more immovable than station, Gathers and washes and is gone. It comes, A slow obscure metonymy of motion, Crumbling the inner barriers of the brain. But the crossed rock braces the hills and makes A steady quiet of the steady music, Massive with peace. And listen, now: The foam receding down the sand silvers Between the grains, thin, pure as virgin words, Lending a sheen to Nothing, whispering.

Barque of phosphor On the palmy beach, Move outward into heaven, Into the alabasters And night blues. Foam and cloud are one. Sultry moon-monsters Are dissolving. Fill your black hull With white moonlight. There will never be an end To this droning of the surf.

It is very stretchy. We know that, even if many details remain sketchy. It is complexly woven. That much too has pretty well been proven. We are loath to continue our lessons which consist of slaps as sharp and dispersed as bee stings from a smashed nest when any strand snaps— hurts working far past the locus of rupture, attacking threads far beyond anything we would have said connects.

For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil War, my father said. The old wound in my ass has opened up again, but I am past the prodigies of youth’s campaigns, and weep where I used to laugh in war’s red humors, half in love with silly-assed pains and half not feeling them. I have to sit up with an indoor unsittable itch before I go down late and weeping to the storm- cellar on a dirty night and go to bed with the worms. So pull the dirt up over me and make a family joke for Old Billy Blue Balls, the oldest private in the world with two ass-holes and no place more to go to for a laugh except the last one. Say: The North won the Civil War without much help from me although I wear a proof of the war’s obscenity.

For old Billy Dugan, shot in the ass in the Civil war, my father said. The old wound in my ass has opened up again, but I am past the prodigies of youth’s campaigns, and weep where I used to laugh in war’s red humors, half in love with silly-assed pains and half not feeling them. I have to sit up with an indoor unsittable itch before I go down late and weeping to the storm- cellar on a dirty night and go to bed with the worms. So pull dirt up over me and make a family joke for Old Billy Blue Balls, the oldest private in the world with two ass-holes and no place more to go to for a laugh except the last one. Say: The North won the Civil War without much help from me although I wear a proof of the war’s obscenity.

Imagine half your face rubbed out yet you are suited up and walking to the office. How will your mates greet you? with heavy hearts, flowers, rosary beads? How shall we greet the orphan boy, the husband whose hand slipped, children and wife swept away? How to greet our new years and our birthdays? Shall we always light a candle? Do we remember that time erases the shore, grass grows, pain’s modified? At Hikkaduwa in 1980 I wrote a ditty, a sailor’s song about rain in sunny Ceylon. I don’t know what Calypsonians would compose about this monstrous wave, this blind hatchet man; don’t know the Baila singers’ reply; we are a “happy and go” people yet the fisherman’s wife knows that her grandfather was eaten by the ocean— fisher communities have suffered in time and what’s happened now is just another feast for that bloody, sleeping mother lapping at our island; but what if the ocean were innocent, the tectonic plates innocent, what if God were innocent? * I do not know how to walk upon the beach, how to lift corpse after corpse until I am exhausted, how to stop the tears when half my face has been rubbed out beyond the railroad tracks and this anaesthetic, this calypso come to the last verse. What shall we write in the sand? Where are gravestones incinerated? Whose ashes are these urned and floating through a house throttled by water? Shall we build a memorial some calculated distance from the sea, in a park, in the shape of a giant wave where we can write the names of the dead? Has the wave lost its beauty? Is it now considered obscene? * Yet tomorrow we must go to the ocean and refresh ourselves in the sea breeze down in Hikkaduwa where it is raining in sunny Ceylon. Tomorrow, we must renew our vows at sunrise, at sunset. Let us say the next time the ocean recedes and parrots gawk and flee, and restless dogs insist their humans wake up, we will not peer at the revelation of the ocean bed, nor seek photographs. We will run to higher ground, and gathered there with our children, our cats, dogs, pigs, with what we’ve carried in our hands —albums, letters— we will make a circle, kneel, sit, stand in no particular direction, pray and be silent, open our lungs and shout thanks to our gods thanks to our dogs.

If one could have that little head of hers Painted upon a background of pale gold, Such as the Tuscan’s early art prefers! No shade encroaching on the matchless mould Of those two lips, which should be opening soft In the pure profile; not as when she laughs, For that spoils all: but rather as if aloft Yon hyacinth, she loves so, leaned its staff’s Burthen of honey-coloured buds to kiss And capture ’twixt the lips apart for this. Then her lithe neck, three fingers might surround, How it should waver on the pale gold ground, Up to the fruit-shaped, perfect chin it lifts! I know, Correggio loves to mass, in rifts Of heaven, his angel faces, orb on orb Breaking its outline, burning shades absorb: But these are only massed there, I should think, Waiting to see some wonder momently Grow out, stand full, fade slow against the sky (That’s the pale ground you’d see this sweet face by), All heaven, meanwhile, condensed into one eye Which fears to lose the wonder, should it wink.

They look at the photo and agree that’s dad in the class photo of Ip Man, Wing Chun master. I look at the face and cannot say it looks like him to me. My brother asked his forensics detective coworker to look at the face. Mom thinks it’s him too, he says proudly. My mother often watches game shows and says look it looks like (insert neighbor) and I look up to see some not-even-ballpark bone structure. What was my father’s face like when he left his country? What was his face like when, alone, he made the pork and peas, washed socks. This wretched neighborhood, when I say hi to white people on the street they don’t say hi back. Chinese either. Who has mastered this face, no sweeping lashes, just one naked thought after another. The young people I think I smile at in a dark crowd who walk away as if my face said,You’re standing in my way move along. I’d dress as Robert Smith or The Crow in high school and friends would say,But you look normal that way. I mention my Han melancholy and you murmur,No,Grandpa told Uncle DiDi we’re Mongolian, I thought you knew? You who had permission to deck any lump on the bus, who got asked later,Are you okay? I walk down the street feeling overly safe, I dgaf and want to magic you my extra. But my face fails me with a weak best, what friends know as “powered-
down mode.” What in the world is she thinking is what I sometimes ask myself, says a colleague about this face. What I partly see, what partly disappears in the mirror.

There is a face I know too well, A face I dread to see, So vain it is, so eloquent Of all futility. It is a human face that hides A monkey soul within, That bangs about, that beats a gong, That makes a horrid din. Sometimes the monkey soul will sprawl Athwart the human eyes, And peering forth, will flesh its pads, And utter social lies. So wretched is this face, so vain, So empty and forlorn, You well may say that better far This face had not been born.