Suji Kwock Kim

If the angle of an eye is all, the slant of hope, the slant of dreaming, according to each life, what is the light of this city, light of Lady Liberty, possessor of the most famous armpit in the world, light of the lovers on Chinese soap operas, throwing BBQ’d ducks at each other with that live-it-up-while-you’re-young, Woo Me kind of love, light of the old men sitting on crates outside geegaw shops selling dried seahorses & plastic Temples of Heaven, light of the Ying ‘n’ Yang Junk Palace, light of the Golden Phoenix Hair Salon, light of Wig-o-ramas, light of the suntanners in Central Park turning over like rotisserie chickens sizzling on a spit, light of the Pluck U & Gone with the Wings fried-chicken shops, the parking-meter-leaners, the Glamazons, the oglers wearing fern-wilting quantities of cologne, strutting, trash-talking, glorious: the immigrants, the refugees, the peddlars, stockbrokers and janitors, stenographers and cooks, all of us making and unmaking ourselves, hurrying forwards, toward who we’ll become, one way only, one life only: free in time but not from it, here in the city the living make together, and make and unmake over and over Quick, quick, ask heaven of it, of every mortal relation, feeling that is fleeing, for what would the heart be without a heaven to set it on? I can’t help thinking no word will ever be as full of life as this world, I can’t help thinking of thanks.

After Ko Un In the village it’s the season of dried grass, the smell of   burned dirt, gaslight glinting through blackened stubble. I walk home across the rice-fields, brushing insects away from my face, remembering old Namdong who was buried yesterday. What does death ask of us? I must change whatever it was I was when the old man was alive. I keep looking at the rice-fields, glinting in the dark. Blasted by mildew, more withered than last year — how much work and love it must have taken. In autumn, no matter how bad the harvest, how big the debts — no thought of   leaving here, no thought of rest. As life goes on, time isn’t the largest thing to think of, it’s the smallest. Growing, going in drought or monsoon, mold or blight — what is the rice if  not alive? With Sunja Kim Kwock

None of the streets here has a name, but if I’m lost tonight I’m happy to be lost. Ten million lanterns light the Seoul avenues for Buddha’s Birthday, ten million red blue green silver gold moons burning far as the eye can see in every direction & beyond, “one for every spirit,” voltage sizzling socket to socket as thought does, firing & firing the soul. Lashed by wind, flying up like helium balloons or hanging still depending on weather, they turn each road into an earthly River of Heaven doubling & reversing the river above, though not made of much: some colored paper, glue, a few wires, a constellation of poor facts. I can't help feeling giddy. I'm drunk on neon, drunk on air, drunk on seeing what was made almost from nothing: if anything's here at all it was built out of ash, out of the skull-rubble of war, the city rising brick by brick like a shared dream, every bridge & pylon & girder & spar a miracle, when half a century ago there was nothing but shrapnel, broken mortar-casings, corpses, the War Memorial in Itaewon counting More than 3 Million Dead, or Missing— still missed by the living, still loved beyond reason, monument to the fact that no one can hurt you, no one kill you like your own people. I’ll never understand it. I wonder about others I see on the sidewalks, each soul fathomless— strikers & scabs walking through Kwanghwamoon, or “Gate of Transformation by Light,” riot police rapping nightsticks against plexiglass-shields, hawkers haggling over cell phones or silk shirts, shaking dirt from chamae& bok choi, chanting price after price, fishermen cleaning tubs of cuttlefish & squid, stripping copper carp, lifting eels or green turtles dripping from tanks, Hanyak peddlars calling out names of cures for sickness or love— crushed bees, snake bile, ground deer antler, chrysanthemum root, bus drivers hurtling past in a blast of diesel-fumes, lovers so tender with each other I hold my breath, dispatchers shouting the names of stations, the grocer who calls me “daughter” because I look like her, for she has long since left home, vendors setting up pojangmachas to cook charred silkworms, broiled sparrows, frying sesame-leaves & mung-bean pancakes, men with hair the color of scallion root playing paduk, or GO, old enough to have stolen overcoats & shoes from corpses, whose spirits could not be broken, whose every breath seems to say: after things turned to their worst, we began again, but may you never go through what we went through, may you never see what we saw, may you never remember & may you never forget.

tend their yard every weekend, when they paint or straighten the purple fencepickets canting each other at the edge of their lot, hammering them down into soil to stand. How long will they stay put? My neighbors mend their gate, hinges rusted to blood-colored dust, then weave gold party-lights with orange lobster-nets & blue buoys along the planks. So much to see & not see again, each chore undone before they know it. I love how faithfully they work their garden all year, scumbling dried eelgrass in fall, raking away mulch in spring. Today the older one, Pat, plants weeds ripped from a cranberry-bog. Sassafras & pickerel, black locust & meadowsweet, wild sarsaparilla, checkerberry, starflower. Will they take root here? Meanwhile Chris waters seeds sown months ago. Furrows of kale, snap-bean, scallion break the surface, greedy for life. Muskrose & lilac cast their last shadows. Is it seeing or sun that makes them flicker, as if they’ve vanished? They shake like a letter in someone’s hand. Here come the guys from Whorfs (“Whores”) Court, walking their dog —also in drag—to the dunes. I miss seeing Disorient Express (a.k.a. Cheng, out of drag) walk by, in tulle & sequins the exact shade of bok choi. He must have endured things no one can name, to name only KS, pneumocystis, aplastic anemia. I remember he walked off his gurney when the ambulance came, then broke his nurse’s fingers in the hospital when he tried to change his IV line, wanting to live without meds. Zorivax, Ativan, leucovorin? I don't know. Pat & Chris pack down the loose dirt. I’ll never know what threads hold our lives together. They kiss, then fall on the grass. I should look away but don’t.