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My father does his own dental work. A power drill and epoxy and steady hands— On Christmas Day, he mistook the Macy’s star for the Viet Cong flag. While watching Forrest Gump, he told me how he too carried a friend. He squeezed around my throat so tight, I thought I’d die with him.

In New York City for a conference on weed control, leaving the hotel in a cluster of horticulturalists, he alone stops, midwestern, crewcut, narrow blue tie, cufflinks, wingtips, holds the door for the Asian woman in a miniskirt and thigh high white leather boots. She nods slightly, a sad and beautiful gesture. Neither smile, as if performing a timeless ritual, as if anticipating the loss of a son or a lover. Years later, Christmas, inexplicably he dons my mother’s auburn wig, my brother’s wire-rimmed glasses, and strikes a pose clowning with my second hand acoustic guitar. He is transformed, a working class hero and a door whispers shut, like cherry blossoms falling.

My father in the night commanding No Has work to do. Smoke issues from his lips; He reads in silence. The frogs are croaking and the street lamps glow. And then my mother winds the gramophone; The Bride of Lammermoor begins to shriek— Or reads a story— About a prince, a castle, and a dragon. The moon is glittering above the hill. I stand before the gateposts of the King— So runs the story Of Thule, at midnight when the mice are still. And I have been in Thule! It has come true— The journey and the danger of the world, All that there is To bear and to enjoy, endure and do. Landscapes, seascapes ... where have I been led? The names of cities—Paris, Venice, Rome— Held out their arms. A feathered god, seductive, went ahead. Here is my house. Under a red rose tree A child is swinging; another gravely plays. They are not surprised That I am here; they were expecting me. And yet my father sits and reads in silence, My mother sheds a tear, the moon is still, And the dark wind Is murmuring that nothing ever happens. Beyond his jurisdiction as I move Do I not prove him wrong? And yet, it’s true They will not change There, on the stage of terror and of love. The actors in that playhouse always sit In fixed positions—father, mother, child With painted eyes. How sad it is to be a little puppet! Their heads are wooden. And you once pretended To understand them! Shake them as you will, They cannot speak. Do what you will, the comedy is ended. Father, why did you work? Why did you weep, Mother? Was the story so important? “Listen!” the wind Said to the children, and they fell asleep.

The last train pulses across the pane and fireflies spark beside the tracks. Acne’s red wing flames my face: I can’t take back this skin. In the other room, a drugstore Timex synchronizes with the faucet’s drip. If I squint, the fireflies align their lives to map the summer’s migraine of flowers that were weeds. You say,but I think they’re just trying to survive —

1 hat As soon as I put it on Brooklyn went dark, but when I took it off my wooden horse stared at me with dazzling glass eyes. 2 coat The shirred hem swished on the floor. Huge shoulders sloped like pines under snow. A panel in the lapel read Kuut, Tallinn in thread letters. I hid at the center behind jet buttons too round to undo. That coarse-nap wool outlasted Estonian winter but now the moths left a trellis of holes so it was never dark when I curled up hugging my knees. My mother cried out: Who are you? I answered in my deepest voice: His coat. 3 shoes I shoved my hands in and taught them to walk: now stumble, now march against your will, left, right, to the Narva front: now dance: and somewhere in that immense city where snow trembled in high lit windows, a footstep receded, rapid, urgent, indelible as a name.

I take my dinners alone, in my room, but I can still hear them through the door, my father’s false teeth clicking like a wooden gate with a metal latch, swinging open, swinging closed. In a water glass at night they float like an exhibit in formaldehyde of a stillborn child. The nightlight shining through the glass— a spelunker’s flashlight in an underwater cave illuminating the fossilized toothed beak of a fierce bird now extinct. My father’s false teeth, when he tries to spit in the toilet, fall in. Only my hand is small enough to reach underwater into the hole and pull them out from the pipe where they are wedged sideways, slightly open. Sometimes a woman expels from her womb something that is all hair and teeth. George Washington was said to always dine alone. His teeth were made of wood, whalebone, and mastodon ivory. My father’s false teeth, God’s first clumsy attempt at wings: two imprints of a horse’s hooves in red clay, hinged together, ringed with small square bones, too heavy to ever fly. My father’s false teeth in the click of computer keys in the tick tick of the eucalyptus outside the window as it twists out of its skin that falls on the pavement like sheets of parchment. A faraway splash in the middle of the night, I sit up in bed, startled— it was George Washington throwing something across the Delaware, not a coin, but his teeth.

Sometimes my old man’s hand flutters over his knee, flaps in crazy circles, and falls back to his leg. Sometimes it leans for an hour on that bony ledge. And sometimes when my old man tries to speak, his hand waggles in the air, chasing a word, then perches again on the bar of his walker or the arm of a chair. Sometimes when evening closes down his window and rain blackens into ice on the sill, it trembles like a sparrow in a storm. Then full dark falls, and it trembles less, and less, until it’s still.

Certain words give him trouble:cannibals,puzzles,sob, bosom,martyr,deteriorate,shake,astonishes,vexed,ode... These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese. Ravish means cướp đoạt;shits is like when you have to đi ỉa; mourners are those whom we say are full of buồn rầu. For “even the like precurse of feared events” think báo trước. Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia, graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencils after “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity —” His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear. His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue. I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis. He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.” My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out his ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses. 1981 was the same year we vượt biển and came to America, where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”). “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he murmurs something about the “dark side of life how awful it can be” as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source. Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes, how could he not have been “ vexed at her brown study / Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed (I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake. Lấy làm ngạc nhiên về is what it means to be astonished. Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe. “There was such speed in her little body , / And such lightness in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future. In “reeducation camp” he had to believe she was alive because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.” Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins, I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading. But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies. Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk. Then between pp. 896-97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,” I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read: For current job opportunities dial(612)297-3180. Answered24hrs. When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end tells me I have reached a non-working number.

at Las Villas, a small Carol City bar with a makeshift stage, where he spends too much time drinking, pretending he can learn to play the guitar at forty-five, become a singer, a musician, who writes about "Que Difícil Es...." to live in Spanish in Miami, a city yet to be translated, in a restaurant where he has taken us for Cuban food, where I sit, frozen, unable to make a sound, where Mother smiles, all her teeth exposed, squeezes my hand, where Mae and Mitzy hide under the table shielding them from shame with a blood-red tablecloth, leaving my mother and me, pale-faced, trapped by the spotlight shining in our eyes, making it difficult for us to pretend we do not know the man in the white suit pointing to us.

You want to know what work is? I’ll tell you what work is: Work is work. You get up. You get on the bus. You don’t look from side to side. You keep your eyes straight ahead. That way nobody bothers you—see? You get off the bus. You work all day. You get back on the bus at night. Same thing. You go to sleep. You get up. You do the same thing again. Nothing more. Nothing less. There’s no handouts in this life. All this other stuff you’re looking for— it ain’t there. Work is work.