248 Family poems

Say what you like about Charaxos, that’s a fellow with a fat-bellied ship always in some port or other. What does Zeus care, or the rest of his gang? Now you’d like me on my knees, crying out to Hera, “Blah, blah, blah, bring him home safe and free of warts,” or blubbering, “Wah, wah, wah, thank you, thank you, for curing my liver condition.” Good grief, gods do what they like. They call down hurricanes with a whisper or send off a tsunami the way you would a love letter. If they have a whim, they make some henchmen fix it up, like those idiots in the Iliad. A puff of smoke, a little fog, away goes the hero, it’s happily ever after. As for Larichos, that lay-a-bed lives for the pillow. If for once he’d get off his ass, he might make something of himself. Then from that reeking sewer of my life I might haul up a bucket of spring water. Translated from the Greek

On our dining table, every dish is a dime-store pattern: blue dandelions, red nasturtiums, the entire stack, a small legacy won in a 1959 coin toss by Lealand, the uncle with the long arms and legs, who pitched penny after penny at a parking lot carnival until his pockets were emptied of everything, but lint and luck. My family wouldn't buy Emporium bowls thick like heads of cabbage or soup spoons holding hand-painted water lilies; our plates, chipped and resounding, clatter at every feast. In America, we acquired what was necessary: some English to earn a living, cotton for dull work, enough noodles for a long life. My father and uncles fled China with a black leather trunk, four wool sweaters, and proud photographs of their two-story mansion. They rented on Mason, Alfred's Steakhouse clanging all night below. Great-Uncle's wife donated a lazy susan, mini Bora Bora pitchforks, and wooden bowls, rancid from salad oil—whatever she couldn't unload at her yard sale. Sundays, she invited her nephews to hang coats, change diapers, and serve finger sandwiches, told guests, ignore those farmboys, too stupid to say yes or no. The boys didn't tell her about the jars of jade or the "big house," its pond swimming with yolk-eating carp. They studied calculus and chemistry and worked after school, eighty-five cents an hour, pouring coffee at Mee Heung Bakery and ironing pleats in sweat shops towards a new life: chicken and fresh fish every day, wonton noodle soup and television at midnight, Grace Kelly on weekends.When I get off the boat, America is a beautiful country, my father says as he watches Uncle Lealand, the organoleptic specialist, dish up the leftover black bean lobster for his cats.

We reconstruct lives in the intensive care unit, pieced together in a buffet dinner: two widows with cancerous breasts in their balled hands; a 30-year-old man in a three-month coma from a Buick and a brick wall; a woman who bleeds off and on from her gullet; a prominent socialite, our own nurse, shrieking for twins, “her bump gone”; the gallery of veterans, succored, awake, without valves, some lungs gone. Splicing the meats with fluids seasoned on the dressing room table, she sings “the bump gone” refrain in this 69-degree oven, unstuffing her twin yolks carved from the breast, the dark meat wrapped in tinfoil and clean newspaper; the half black registered nurse hums her six years in an orphanage, her adopted white family, breaded and primed in a posse, rising in clan for their dinner. We reload our brains as the cameras, the film overexposed in the x-ray light, locked with our double door light meters: race and sex spooled and rungs in a hobby; we take our bundle and go home.

Son of Man. Son of Marvin & Tallulah. Son of Flatbush & roti & dollar vans bolting down the avenue after six. The boy grew like a debt, & beautified every meter of the pockmarked, jet black asphalt which held him aloft on days he sped from much larger men along its skin. Godfathers & hustlers, Division 1 scholarship forfeiters, alchemists, liars, lasagna connoisseurs, Internet mixtape DJs & baby mama conflict consultants, each one appearing as if from the smoke of our 
collective imagination, Jordans laced, drawstrings taut, all of them gathered one by one to race the gangly, mop-top prodigy from the front of Superior Market to the block’s endarkened terminus, the same corner where Man Man got jumped so bad at the back end of last summer, neighborhood residents came to regard the place as a kind of memorial & it was like this every other afternoon, you know, from June through the final days leading up to the book drives & raucous cookouts which signaled our school year’s inauspicious return, this was the manner by which Mycah Dudley first gained his fame, dusting grown men without so much as the faintest scintillation of sweat to make the performance ethical. It was damn near unsportsmanlike, his effortlessness, mass cruelty in a New York City dreamscape, the laughter of girls with hip-length, straight-back braids & baby powder Forces making every contest an event worth leaving the perch of your bunk bed, stepping out into the record-breaking swelter that summer held like a trap door for kids with broken box fans & no mother home for at least four more hours to fill the quiet with discipline. • We gathered in swarms to gawk at our boy before takeoff. His flesh maroon-clad from head to foot like an homage to blood, black plastic afro pick with a fist for a handle jutting from the left side of his high-top fade, his high-top Chuck Taylors, size 12, sounding like ox hooves once he entered the groove of a good run & the distinction was basically moot at that point is what I am saying, the line between him & any other mystical creature, any worthwhile myth, any god of prey or waning life. • The entire block was out that night. Firecrackers packed the blackening air, their fury matched only by the exorbitance of dope-boy 
convertibles turned mobile dancehalls by the moment’s weight. Which might explain why no one quite remembers when, or how, the now-infamous brawl began. Only that Mycah was in rare form earlier that evening, having just embarrassed Mars Patterson — so named, it bears mentioning, for the chocolate bars he loved to steal & trade on the 4 train, not the red rock planet or lord of war — but was now in his everyday mode, seated on the stoop, a seer with so few words for devotees & passersby, each eventually stopped asking for his backstory, 
for his praise or functional wisdom, & instead were content to let him eat his veggie patty with cheese without interruption, which he did, which he was, when the din that always accompanies someone’s son’s public pummeling rang out, cut through our scene lengthwise, compelled the boy, for the first time on record, to leap from the steps of the brownstone his nana died braiding hair inside of, enter the scrum, thresh the crowd for signs of the conflict’s center. • General consensus has it he was looking for his little cousin, & found him, even before the initial cop car ran like a living ram through the people. Before the boys in blue sprang, a spray of navy fléchettes, from behind its doors. Before they were caught in the scuffle, released ten to twenty rounds of ammo into the crowd without warning, bullets glancing off of Cutlass doors & corner store glass built for battle, all but three or four of which entered the boy mid-stride, lifted his six-foot frame from the ground, legs still pumping. For a second, you would almost swear he was running through the gunfire, preparing for liftoff or something, baby cousin held firmly in his arms, shielded from the onslaught.They never would have caught him if he hadn’t been holding that child, said no one, though we all thought it during the weeks following that moment we each froze, the moment his body collapsed slow as petals upon the unremarkable cement, & we stared at our champion felled by an outcome so common we don’t even have a special name for it. Still. No one standing ran that day. Most of us turned to face his killers, hands at our sides, determined to make them make it a massacre. But all that was before we heard Man Man let off a scream so full it rent the crowd in two, split the circle we had built around the boy’s corpse, our human wall parting to watch each casing fall from Mycah’s still-wet, dark red sweatshirt onto the street. Hear me. I heard the gunman’s greeting. Saw hollow points etch 
apertures into the boy’s clothes. They shot Mycah Dudley, quite 
legally. He died that night. He rose.

Each night, in a space he’d make between waking and purpose, my grandfather donned his one suit, in our still dark house, and drove through Brooklyn’s deserted streets following trolley tracks to the bakery. There he’d change into white linen work clothes and cap, and in the absence of women, his hands were both loving, well into dawn and throughout the day— kneading, rolling out, shaping each astonishing moment of yeasty predictability in that windowless world lit by slightly swaying naked bulbs, where the shadows staggered, woozy with the aromatic warmth of the work. Then, the suit and drive, again. At our table, graced by a loaf that steamed when we sliced it, softened the butter and leavened the very air we’d breathe, he’d count us blessed.

Dad calls her the Dowager but I call her Aunt G. Aunt G. at the Polo Lounge. Aunt G. drinking gimlets by the pool. Aunt G. asking about Babe even though she’s the only one who sees her that much anymore. She wears ten rings. Seven on her right hand, which Dad calls the Seven Stars. They make the glass seem like it’s going to crack. She doesn’t like me very much. I know it. I’m not her kind of girl. I won’t wear dresses and when she placed the ring inside my hand I just said, “No, thank you.” Not even thinking how rude that might sound. What would I do with a ring like that? I’ve got my own stars and she doesn’t really want to give me presents anyway. She gave Babe a car, her dark brown Aston Martin. And she gave David a watch to “remember home by.” She gave my Dad a look when he said, “David’s a good soldier.” Like he gave her something bad to eat. She just shook her head and said, “I’ll never understand what kind of man you are.” And then she said Dad would have that young boy’s blood on his hands. Which I don’t understand. Or why she said, “You’ve gone and lost the both of them. You’re your very own Pol Pot,” while looking through her purse. It shone so bright it blinded me. For a second I saw spots and couldn’t focus on the thing. One clear stone that caught the light and made reflections on my glasses. I didn’t want it. I don’t wear things like that. “Who are you?” she asked, not in a mean way but like she truly didn’t know. And didn’t really care. She took it back and asked me if  I’d talked to Babe and I said I had not and no one else had either. I said, “She’s living in the hills.” And she looked at the ring for a minute and put it back in her purse.

One rainy night we sat in traffic and, overtired in back, you saw a wind-whipped grocery bag afloat beyond the clutch of jagged branches, swept by gusts and whirled in eddies. A sudden downdraft swooped it earthward, where it danced till with a whoosh a current luffed it past the power lines. Disowned by gravity, small ghost not yet snagged by twiggy fingers, it couldn’t reach the earth. Thin-skinned, it pulsed, translucent jellyfish. You wept and pled to be let out into the dark and slanted rain, somehow to save that desolate thing. The light turned green and still you begged, Go back,go back, on its behalf, caught and held, bossed and tossed by a will much greater than its own.

Same size, my parents stained and tore alike in the barn, their brown hair ripe as cow after twelve hours of gutters. At supper they spoke in jokey moos. Sure, showers could dampen that reek down to a whiff under fingernails, behind ears, but no wash could wring the animal from their clothes: one pair, two pair, husband, wife, reversible.

Washing Kai in the sauna, The kerosene lantern set on a box outside the ground-level window, Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the washtub down on the slab Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops brushed by on the pile of rocks on top He stands in warm water Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach “Gary don’t soap my hair!” —his eye-sting fear— the soapy hand feeling through and around the globes and curves of his body up in the crotch, And washing-tickling out the scrotum, little anus, his penis curving up and getting hard as I pull back skin and try to wash it Laughing and jumping, flinging arms around, I squat all naked too, is this our body? Sweating and panting in the stove-steam hot-stone cedar-planking wooden bucket water-splashing kerosene lantern-flicker wind-in-the-pines-out sierra forest ridges night— Masa comes in, letting fresh cool air sweep down from the door a deep sweet breath And she tips him over gripping neatly, one knee down her hair falling hiding one whole side of shoulder, breast, and belly, Washes deftly Kai’s head-hair as he gets mad and yells— The body of my lady, the winding valley spine, the space between the thighs I reach through, cup her curving vulva arch and hold it from behind, a soapy tickle                a hand of grail The gates of Awe That open back a turning double-mirror world of wombs in wombs, in rings, that start in music, is this our body? The hidden place of seed The veins net flow across the ribs, that gathers milk and peaks up in a nipple—fits our mouth— The sucking milk from this our body sends through jolts of light; the son, the father, sharing mother’s joy That brings a softness to the flower of the awesome open curling lotus gate I cup and kiss As Kai laughs at his mother’s breast he now is weaned from, we wash each other, this our body Kai’s little scrotum up close to his groin, the seed still tucked away, that moved from us to him In flows that lifted with the same joys forces as his nursing Masa later, playing with her breast, Or me within her, Or him emerging, this is our body: Clean, and rinsed, and sweating more, we stretch out on the redwood benches hearts all beating Quiet to the simmer of the stove, the scent of cedar And then turn over, murmuring gossip of the grasses, talking firewood, Wondering how Gen’s napping, how to bring him in soon wash him too— These boys who love their mother who loves men, who passes on her sons to other women; The cloud across the sky. The windy pines. the trickle gurgle in the swampy meadow this is our body. Fire inside and boiling water on the stove We sigh and slide ourselves down from the benches wrap the babies, step outside, black night & all the stars. Pour cold water on the back and thighs Go in the house—stand steaming by the center fire Kai scampers on the sheepskin Gen standing hanging on and shouting, “Bao! bao! bao! bao! bao!” This is our body. Drawn up crosslegged by the flames drinking icy water hugging babies, kissing bellies, Laughing on the Great Earth Come out from the bath.

—Seoul, Korea 1971 Father gave her a little extra. How could she not fall for him? He was handsome but still a boy. In the depot where soldiers took such women, his skinny body clung too close to hers and his narrow ass still belonged to his mother. The other men knew the routine and how much to pay. She loathed their accent and American swagger. The sweat would barely cool and dry before another shook the cot and bucked his hips out of rhythm—in some other time zone. However, he began to offer other things besides money. He brought sweets from the base and the minute he touched his pocket the face she reserved for his English crumbled like sweet toffee. Because he didn't know how to say what he wanted to say, no time was spent on uneasiness. Chocolate, caramel and peanuts spoke best, secured his place. He hooked his arms through hers as if they could stroll the lane like an ordinary couple: the unassuming black and the Korean whore in the middle of the Vietnam War.