Garrett Hongo

At six I lived for spells: how a few Hawaiian words could call up the rain, could hymn like the sea in the long swirl of chambers curling in the nautilus of a shell, how Amida’s ballads of the Buddhaland in the drone of the priest’s liturgy could conjure money from the poor and give them nothing but mantras, the strange syllables that healed desire. I lived for stories about the war my grandfather told over hana cards, slapping them down on the mats with a sharp Japanese kiai. I lived for songs my grandmother sang stirring curry into a thick stew, weaving a calligraphy of Kannon’s love into grass mats and straw sandals. I lived for the red volcano dirt staining my toes, the salt residue of surf and sea wind in my hair, the arc of a flat stone skipping in the hollow trough of a wave. I lived in a child’s world, waited for my father to drag himself home, dusted with blasts of sand, powdered and the strange ash of raw cement, his deafness made worse by the clang of pneumatic drills, sore in his bones from the buckings of a jackhammer. He’d hand me a scarred lunchpail, let me unlace the hightop G.I. boots, call him the new name I’d invented that day in school, write it for him on his newspaper. He’d rub my face with hands that felt like gravel roads, tell me to move, go play, an then he’d walk to the laundry sink to scrub, rinse the dirt of his long day from a face brown and grained as koa wood. I wanted to take away the pain in his legs, the swelling in his joints, give him back his hearing, clear and rare as crystal chimes, the fins of glass that wrinkled and sparked the air with their sound. I wanted to heal the sores that work and war had sent to him, let him play catch in the backyard with me, tossing a tennis ball past papaya trees without the shoulders of pain shrugging back his arms. I wanted to become a doctor of pure magic, to string a necklace of sweet words fragrant as pine needles and plumeria, fragrant as the bread my mother baked, place it like a lei of cowrie shells and pikake flowers around my father’s neck, and chant him a blessing, a sutra.

No one knew the secret of my flutes, and I laugh now because some said I was enlightened. But the truth is I’m only a gardener who before the War was a dirt farmer and learned how to grow the bamboo in ditches next to the fields, how to leave things alone and let the silt build up until it was deep enough to stink bad as night soil, bad as the long, witch-grey hair of a ghost. No secret in that. My land was no good, rocky, and so dry I had to sneak water from the whites, hacksaw the locks off the chutes at night, and blame Mexicans, Filipinos, or else some wicked spirit of a migrant, murdered in his sleep by sheriffs and wanting revenge. Even though they never believed me, it didn’t matter—no witnesses, and my land was never thick with rice, only the bamboo growing lush as old melodies and whispering like brush strokes against the fine scroll of wind. I found some string in the shed or else took a few stalks and stripped off their skins, wove the fibers, the floss, into cords I could bind around the feet, ankles, and throats of only the best bamboos. I used an ice pick for an awl, a fish knife to carve finger holes, and a scythe to shape the mouthpiece. I had my flutes. * When the War came, I told myself I lost nothing. My land, which was barren, was not actually mine but leased (we could not own property) and the shacks didn’t matter. What did were the power lines nearby and that sabotage was suspected. What mattered to me were the flutes I burned in a small fire by the bath house. * All through Relocation, in the desert where they put us, at night when the stars talked and the sky came down and drummed against the mesas, I could hear my flutes wail like fists of wind whistling through the barracks. I came out of Camp, a blanket slung over my shoulder, found land next to this swamp, planted strawberries and beanplants, planted the dwarf pines and tended them, got rich enough to quit and leave things alone, let the ditches clog with silt again and the bamboo grow thick as history. * So, when it’s bad now, when I can’t remember what’s lost and all I have for the world to take means nothing, I go out back of the greenhouse at the far end of my land where the grasses go wild and the arroyos come up with cat’s-claw and giant dahlias, where the children of my neighbors consult with the wise heads of sunflowers, huge against the sky, where the rivers of weather and the charred ghosts of old melodies converge to flood my land and sustain the one thicket of memory that calls for me to come and sit among the tall canes and shape full-throated songs out of wind, out of bamboo, out of a voice that only whispers.

In Chicago, it is snowing softly and a man has just done his wash for the week. He steps into the twilight of early evening, carrying a wrinkled shopping bag full of neatly folded clothes, and, for a moment, enjoys the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper, flannellike against his gloveless hands. There’s a Rembrandt glow on his face, a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek as a last flash of sunset blazes the storefronts and lit windows of the street. He is Asian, Thai or Vietnamese, and very skinny, dressed as one of the poor in rumpled suit pants and a plaid mackinaw, dingy and too large. He negotiates the slick of ice on the sidewalk by his car, opens the Fairlane’s back door, leans to place the laundry in, and turns, for an instant, toward the flurry of footsteps and cries of pedestrians as a boy—that’s all he was— backs from the corner package store shooting a pistol, firing it, once, at the dumbfounded man who falls forward, grabbing at his chest. A few sounds escape from his mouth, a babbling no one understands as people surround him bewildered at his speech. The noises he makes are nothing to them. The boy has gone, lost in the light array of foot traffic dappling the snow with fresh prints. Tonight, I read about Descartes’ grand courage to doubt everything except his own miraculous existence and I feel so distinct from the wounded man lying on the concrete I am ashamed. Let the night sky cover him as he dies. Let the weaver girl cross the bridge of heaven and take up his cold hands. IN MEMORY OF JAY KASHIWAMURA

In December 1941, after Lvov had already been seized by Nazis while you labored diligently by day as a quiet feeder of lice in a virus lab and joined your heart to the resistance that would rise in Warsaw, my own country’s agents took me from my home in Lā‘ie, placed me in a jail cell in Honolulu and interrogated me for many days. Neither of us had thought of our poetry then, Zbigniew, not of the caustic sarcasm of your strophes stripped of pious words, not of the praises of the life I would lose like a lavish field of rice once bending with weight but blighted overnight by the black cowls of disease. I told them I was just a storekeeper who liked night fishing — no submarines was I signaling offshore, nothing but schooling fish did I hope would come to the sputtering lights of my torches that I stuck in the sand like stakes for growing beans in my family garden. The ocean knew of my intentions, lapping softly at my knees, curling in kind, foaming waters around the bones of my bare feet. And the winds knew of my 
poverty, sending me a cloudless night sky, stippling the lagoon with stalks of red flames. But my government questioners cited my language was the enemy’s, my academy in Hiroshima a military school, my citizen’s heart black as diesel. They sent me to a barracks on an island in Pearl Harbor where I could see the burnt wreckage of scores of ships, hear their moaning steel like drowned sailors who still cry out, throats choked with oil, from their watery graves, feel nothing but panic and regret as though a child had died, my hope wrapped in old newspapers and thrown away like offal cleaned from a fish the size of a man. Then to a ship bound for Oakland, and by train and truck with men like me, Japanese all, to Fort Missoula, and a cold wind like a dull razor scraping across my stubbled face. What was my crime except to belong to an enemy race? Why can they not see that I love, like them, the promise that is this land like a wife to whom we have sworn only faith and practiced devotion? I would wash her feet with water gathered in a canvas bucket, carry her burdens across canefields and over the shallows of our bay, ruffled with wind, if she would, yet once more as on her bridal evening, speak her vows and turn the soft bundles of her body, heaving like a warm tide in my arms, back to mine.

for Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong Lau I. A Porphyry of Elements Starting in a long swale between the Sierras and the Coast Range, Starting from ancient tidepools of a Pleistocene sea, Starting from exposed granite bedrock, From sandstone and shale, glaciated, river-worn, and scuffed by wind, Tired of the extremes of temperature, the weather’s wantonness, Starting from the survey of a condor’s eye Cutting circles in the sky over Tehachapi and Tejon, Starting from lava flow and snow on Shasta, a head of white hair, a garland of tongue-shaped obsidian, Starting from the death of the last grizzly, The final conversion of Tulare County to the internal-combustion engine, Staring from California oak and acorn, scrubgrass, rivermist, and lupine in the foothills, From days driving through the outfield clover of Modesto in a borrowed Buick, From nights drinking pitchers of dark in the Neon Moon Bar & Grill, From mornings grabbing a lunchpail, work gloves, and a pisspot hat, From Digger pine and Douglas fir and aspen around Placerville, From snowmelt streams slithering into the San Joaquin, From the deltas and levees and floods of the Sacramento, From fall runs of shad, steelhead, and salmon, From a gathering of sand, rock, gypsum, clay, limestone, water, and tar, From a need or desire to throw your money away in The Big City, From a melting of history and space in the crucible of an oil-stained hand— Starting from all these, this porphyry of elements, this aggregate of experiences Fused like feldspar and quartz to the azure stone of memory and vision, Starting from all of these and an affectionate eye for straight, unending lines, We hit this old road of Highway Ninety-Nine! II. A Samba for Inada Let’s go camping Let’s go chanting Let’s go cruising Let’s go boozing Let’s go smoke Let’s go folk Let’s go rock Let’s go bop Let’s go jazz Let’s go fast Let’s go slow Let’s go blow Let’s go Latin Let’s go cattin Let’s go jiving Let’s go hiding Let’s go disco Let’s go Frisco Let’s go blues Let’s go cruise Let’s go far Let’s go near Let’s go camping Let’s go chanting Let’s go lazy Let’s go boozing Let’s go crazy Let’s go cruising III. Cruising in the Greater Vehicle/A Jam Session “Well, goddamnit, Lawson! Whyn’t you play in key and keep to the rhythm? First you say you wanna go back to Fresno, back to the fish store and Kamaboko Gardens on the West Side, and then you say, forget it, I take it back, let’s go to the Sacto Bon-Odori instead.” “Yeah. And this ain’t even shoyu season yet, chump!” “Awww, hell. What’s wrong with you two? Can’t you improvise? You know, I’m just laying down a bass, man. Just a rhythm, a scale, something to jam on, something to change, find our range, something to get us going. Once we get started, we can work our way around to Weed, put on some tire chains, or break down in Selma, refuse to buy grapes, raisins, or Gallo, do a pit-stop at a Sacto sporting goods, pick up some air mattresses shaped like pearl-diving women, and float all day downriver to the deltas, sipping Cokes and saké in the summer heat.” “Shit. Whyn’t you just solo and forget the rest of us? You start chanting and pretty soon we’re hearing the entire Lotus Sutra.” “You two Buddhaheads just a pair of one-eyed Japs with dishpan hands and deadpan minds, man. This is the Champ Chonk talking, and we’re playing Chinese anaconda. Eight-card, no-peek pak-kai, roll your own, hi-lo, three for sweep, four for hot-sour soup stud, and neither of you’s put down your ante yet. So shit or get off the shu-mai, fellas.” “Calm down and watch the road, Alan.” “Who’s driving this heap, anyway?” “I thought you were.” “I thought Lawson was.” “Don’t worry. This is a dodo-driven, autopiloted, cruise-controlled, Triple- A-mapped, Flying-A-gassed, dual-overhead-cam, Super-Sofistifunktified, Frijole Guacamole, Gardena Guahuanco, Chonk Chalupa Cruiser with Buddha Bandit Bumpers, Jack!” “Where we going, Alan?” “Where do you think? We’re going to Paradise.” IV. On the Road to Paradise Distances don’t matter nor the roll of the road past walnut groves. It’s sky that counts, the color of it at dawn or sunset, a match more true to the peach than a mix of oils by Matisse. Or maybe it’s actually the weather we love most, the way it shifts and scatters over the state like radio waves bouncing off the face of the moon. The one over there, near Yuba City, rising over a backyard garden of onions, tomatoes, squash, and corn. The one with the spider scrambling through celery, harvesting moths and mayflies from the web it has strung between stalks. Sometimes I wish I could harvest the weather, reap it like wheat or rice, store it in a silo announcing steady rain or clear skies on its sides. When the prices rise, I could ship hailstorms or Santanas in orange crates, make Safeway go broke, do something politically efficacious for a change. But all I really do besides write these poems is allow my mind to wander while I drive. There it goes, down the arroyo, through manzanita and Mormon tea. Or there, up the mustard and Indian pipe on the hill. Might as well let it. Nothing but God and Country on the radio now. Wolfman Jack’s syndicated and the Dodgers haven’t made it to Vero Beach. I wish this road would turn or bend, intersect with a spy movie some Spanish galleon, or maybe a Chinese poem with landscapes in brocade, mist, wine, and moonlight. This California moon is yellow most of the time, like it was stained with nicotine, or sealed in amber like an insect. Why is it always better somewhere else? Why do I always wish I were Tu Fu? V. Palmistry Fantasia There, the pasteboard and neon hand! Just past the interchange by the bowling alley. The one with silver rockets, small green stars, and a trail of red comets flashing through the smog. It’s still here, the hand held up in greeting or command. “Halt!” it says, or “Peace be with you, brother,” while the map across its palm traces excursions into blue trees, green skies, and mushroom-colored lives. Blue dun is the color of its neon, the same as the throat feathers of a teal scudding over the marshes of Merced. It matches the purple mascara the gypsy woman wears, matches the pools of velvet-blue darkness in her eyes. Her name is Alma Josephina, and she designed the sign herself, imitating the figure of her own hand, the neon indicative of its natural aura. That was twenty years ago when Eisenhower was President and all her customers wore pedal pushers or Bermudas, and never noticed the fireflies in the marshes at night. * You’re Oriental, aren’t you? Can you read tea leaves? I tried to once, years ago, had a Chinese woman teaching me, but her fees were too steep. I like a joke. It loosens up the customers. Well, come here towards the light. Let me get a good look at the ghosts in the grave of your palm. They’re there, you know. All the people you’ve ever been, all the trips you’ve taken and the towns you’ve settled in, back before the birth of Christ, back before people were people, before this paw was a hand. You see?   The whole palm glows like purple mist over a cemetery. Move closer.   Clamp it around the glass. See it flare on the inside? That’s the light your bones make, not the crystal at all. Look at your hand now. You can see yourself dancing on the heel just above the wrist. You must be a happy man. You’ll be born again and again, get to the threshold of Heaven, never enter but keep coming back, here, for fun, for friends, until this will be Paradise, and Paradise just an old resort the highway’s passed by. Well, have a nice trip. You’ll make it yet. Says so right in that curvy line around the Mound of Venus, that thumbstump there, right where the long straight line cuts across like an interstate. VI. Postcards Sent Home 1. Dust rolls out of the hills like fog, and it’s too hot for shoes or shirts. I’d like to take my hair off too, peel it from my head, dip it in a bucket of ice, and wear it around my neck like a bandana. 2. Crickets attend the night, add a falsetto drone to the sound of us pissing in the tumbleweeds. 3. There’s a Tastee-Freeze in Fresno, A & Dub’s closed down, Jack-in-the-Box keeps popping up, and McDonald’s owns the town. 4. Somebody’s drying tobacco leaves on the laundry line. There, see them furl and flap next to the nylons? 5. A giant oak uncurls over the road, sprinkles a fine yellow powder on the windshield. The sun hits, touches it off in a spasm of golden-red light. VII. Body & Fender/Body & Soul At the grill, the Indian girl with buckteeth and dimples serves us a round of coffee and sweet rolls. We’re waiting for the guy at Henley’s Texaco, down the street, to find us a fan belt that’ll fit.   It’s early, the sky’s still in the john, shaving, and the sports page has to wait to get in. Everybody’s grumpy. We sit around, jab at raisins with our forks, and try to look as tough as the waitresss. Her name’s Rita. Her brothers jump fires and pump oil in Alaska. Her sisters string beads and make babies back on the Res. Her ex is white, a logger who threatened never to come back and didn’t. She doesn’t hold any grudges. That’s why she’s so nice, why she pops her gum filling the salt and pepper shakers, why she adjusts her girdle so we can see, why the egg spot on her dress doesn’t show. Outside, the sun eases up over the parking lot, scrambles across the freeway, and runs for cover behind a pile of pumpkin-colored clouds. 99 starts shuffling its deck of cars and pickups, getting set to deal a hand of nine-to-five stud. We don’t watch. This is Redding, and ain’t nothing thing going on besides the day shift. Alan says, “Look, there’s Venus,” and points to a piece of light draining the sky. I want to order a country- fried steak, talk about the Dodgers, but there isn’t time. Lawson hums a few chords, stirring the changes with his coffee spoon. Rita cruises back like a bus bound for Reno, starts dealing some ashtrays. She says, “How’s it going boys?” I answer for all of us—“Hey, Rita. It’s almost gone.” VIII. Pilgrimage to the Shrine Six hours since the Paradise Cutoff and running on empty. No gas stations or rest stops, no weigh station, no cops. Just miles of straight road and a long double-yellow unrolling in front of us. Alan recognized nothing. Lawson pops the glove, pulls out a penlight, and fingers the map, pronouncing a few mantras. Our headlights slide over a scarecrow made of tumbleweeds standing by the road. He’s wearing a kimono, a dark-blue stovepipe hat, his shoulders cloaked in a wreath of chrysanthemums. We pull over, back up, and he disappears into the pale- grey darkness. It’s smoke. We can smell it, so somebody’s got to be close by. But our eyes go blined, fill with tears and ashes as we stumble down the off-ramp. The smell of frying trout and steamed rice reaches us when we come to. An old hermit, dressed like the scarecrow, crawls out of his barracks and brings us tea. “Drink!” he says, “It’ll pick you up!” And so we drink, feeling drugged. Soft blues in the key of sleep suffocates the air. From up the mountain, the sound of obsidian, flaking in the wind. Clouds of black glass waltz around us. We dress ourselves in shrouds of tule reeds stitched with barbed wire, stained with salt and mud. We refuse to cry. We drift back to the highway, holding our fists like rattles, shaking them like bones. IX. Confessions of the Highway/The Hermit Speaks I know the rituals, the spells of grapes, the ceremonies of tomatoes, celery, and rice. I know the color of wind dressed for fiesta, and the names of carnivals in Spanish and Japanese. I am familiar with the determination of campesinos who migrate up and down the stretch of the state in search of crops ready for harvest. It’s all a dull ache in my back, small cuts on the throats of my fingers, and the alkali of a dry lake in my lungs. For me, the oracle of the giant orange always predicts good fortune, yet, it never comes true. My stomach is full of sand and tar, a little bit of paint, a few crickets. I stand in swampwater up to my hips, and the stink of rotting figs escapes my armpits in small brown clouds. Scrub oak and tumbleweed sprout from my scalp, make a small grove behind my left ear. I don’t know why sparrows and starlings refuse to approach me, to take the grass seed tucked in the cuffs of my trousers. Maybe it’s the stain of asphalt around my ankles, this copper sheen of sweat on my back. Sometimes, when the valley heat makes the bones in my feet start to hiss and burn, the desire to escape comes over me again. I can’t help it. My arms pull down a few telephone posts, my shoulders churn against the bindings. I feel myself wanting to sit up, begin to walk again, and thresh my way across rice fields and acres of alfalfa. For once I’d like to lift my face straight above Shasta into the sky, shout in unison with thunder, roar with the assurance of Santana wind, leap out of these bonds of copper and steel, slough off this skin of cement, and walk south or north or even west into the weather and the sea.