Jennifer Kwon Dobbs

“I want to understand the joy I felt as I was letting him go.” —Hwang Jini As I listened to the fabric of his jacket assume the casual shape of leave-taking. I learned how to unhinge form from breath unbind & unknot the numinous black, so that again I was a woman & an artist whose ravens fell onto the ondol floor like cords, not a suicide’s hair floating in a village well & souring the water. Callus on my finger, cushion for the kayabam, we shall pluck the string to forget triumphs before royalty taxing us for a celadon barge, shall sweep princes’ names into a crevice where we store besotted & sudden proposals to suck a jujube’s succulent orb, as if we required their directions to resist the stone in which a waiting life will crack a rooting. Tendril of song, evening calm, guide my sense of use across the instrument transforming my desire for vengeance into forest hearth smoke from which I fled as a pretty child, selected by the king’s men. Help me never to forget the elation I felt when my first patron swore by the river’s force his love for me, & I understood its swelling to rush & breach could teach me to survive it by emptying myself to play a perfect note.

(1970-2001) After the bullet discharges through the tunnel of his mouth, after it shatters the Oklahoma evening, rips through ragweed & across many rivers, my apartment in Pittsburgh, the metal clips my arm, slams into a plaster wall, & the silence is his body slackening & the black fact of the gun underwater. I compress my wound as his ghost kneels beside his body, the bathtub, & as his ghost draws the shower curtain back, I look away. No, I don’t want to know his secrets, why surer hands will tag, bag as evidence. He is a poet. He makes the difficult question of speaking a matter of remembering how he shouted the poems he loved. His outbursts were pure country. Yes, rumors circulated, how vets suffer medication, what he saw as a S.E.A.L., how weird, & no one could stand the belabored way he read aloud, & I said all the above & more, & to his face when no one was around when he finally caught on, I asked him, ‘Why are you quieter? I’ve noticed, & it scares me.’ * Even now I’m busy with details, the dirty work of gathering. Here’s rosemary & some pansies, that’s for thoughts rambled to me one Fall afternoon, Cathedral of Learning, how Komunyakaa showed him a way to anchor a moment between stillness & approach turning toward tall grass or a woman’s wet hair to braid, or how it could lock arms with an enemy, lose to an overwhelming grasp, or listen to the dying echo of paradise birds singing so much gibberish, as if a whole life could be reduced to one image dangling from a fist & engraved with a number, as if a poem wants only to be identified upon delivery, which was why Daniel read Blake, Calvino & Crane for fire & crystal. Why he shut himself up with Bishop. Why Stern’s huge breath, why Oppen, Tu Fu & Paz. Lewis & Vollmer mattered for their generosities, lines layered like the earth in his face, the reds & browns of his voice deepening to what he pursued, half-formed in haze & burrowing underneath to avoid tripwire, & Daniel yelling as he plunged after its gray, disappearing shape. * I listen to his ghost pace the hallway as if barefoot across dirt, fronds like unfurled scrolls, rustle. Root scent & rainfall stain his cheeks with welcome, risk. He has walked far to finish this conversation between us. He brushes against the wood, taps the doorknob trying to explain the jagged web of cracks in my wall, hot metal at the center like a labyrinth chamber or the slick tip of a widow hunched over & spinning a bundle or the pure ore from a journey toward sublimation, a soul’s treasure, or the soul, itself, lodged in a network & inconsolable because wings never guaranteed perfect pitch. * Daniel, the scar on my arm fades as I read your poems again, & the maps you drew time spackles over for a move out west. The twenty that someone taped to my office desk for flowers remains unspent, a bookmarker for a Ramses biography. I tried.   I couldn’t find your permanent address. Daniel, the news today proclaims disaster, code orange to survive for tomorrow’s headline that you were right could, at any moment, slip under a thicket, emerge skittish beside a pile of leaves, its long gray nose & black eyes focused on your movements. How you wrote it down, my friend, held it in the starless night & gave it pink fingers with which to scratch back.

How should I index myself so that you can retrieve & cut me from the 1970 catalogs of infant headshots & paste me beside you? This I wanted to know while the grandfather held up his 1940 photo of three men laughing beside a new Buick. He said, "If you could identify them, then my life would be changed forever." If anyone knows the names for paper as vulnerable as skin, then please tell me if I find my birth documents burned, ripped, or yellowed with information missing, or if I don't find them at all? I listened as the panelists advised the grandfather to search the database, my body like too much information unsorted: all errors, useless without a way to see it linked to get somewhere. My arms disappearing while the grandfather passed his laminated photo around the room.