478 Identity poems

I am tired of having five different names;                      - Having to change them when I enter A new country or take on a new life. My First name is my truest, I suppose, but I Never use it and nobody calls me by this Vietnamese Name though it is on my birth certificate— Tue My Chuc. It makes the sound of a twang of a String pulled. My parents tell me my name in Cantonese is Chuc Mei Wai. Three soft bird chirps and they call me Ah Wai. Shortly after I moved to the U.S., I became Teresa My Chuc, then Teresa Mei Chuc. “Teresa” is the sound Water makes when one is washing one’s hands. After my first Marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Prokopiev. After my second marriage, my name was Teresa Chuc Dowell. Now I am back to Teresa Mei Chuc, but I want to go way back. Reclaim that name once given and lost so quickly in its attempt to become someone that would fit in. Who is Tue My Chuc? I don’t really know. I was never really her and her birthday on March 16, I never celebrate because it’s not my real birthday though it is on my birth certificate. My birthday is on January 26, really, but I have to pretend that it’s on March 16 because my mother was late registering me after the war. Or it’s in December, the date changing every year according to the lunar calendar—this is the one my parents celebrate because it’s my Chinese birthday. All these names and birthdays make me dizzy. Sometimes I just don’t feel like a Teresa anymore; Tue (pronounced Twe) isn’t so embarrassing. A fruit learns to love its juice. Anyways, I’d like to be string... resonating. Pulled back tensely like a bow Then reverberate in the arrow’s release straight for the heart.

Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned from war with stories slumped over their shoulders; their fingers firm at the knot, the netting, thick and tangled with the names of the dead. None could explain how the flood of life all around them escaped like water from between cupped hands, how the bodies of men they loved began to crust the earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived. When I came home from college proud, my educated mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy and I saw the names of my friends, the young men I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behind Lil’Rocc, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Junebug, Aghoster names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood in memoriam, I couldn’t understand how a god could make one life possible and strip the world clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.

Some nights we feel the furred darkness of an ancient one's breath and are trapped in awakening, dismembered by events we no longer recall. We can touch the windowsill, where October air gathers as hours slip past in thin robes, the forest a concert of voices. The last crickets let go of their songs. The land speaks, its language arising from its own geography— the mountains' hulked shapes are blue whales, remembering when they were undersea ridges, and rivers are serpentine strands hammered from silver, and dark trees talk to the wind—weaving mortal lives, drumbeats, pillars of smoke, voices wavering into updraft, the storyteller shifting the present.

Grandma laughing on her deathbed. Eternity, the quiet one, listening in. Like moths around an oil lamp we were. Like ragdolls tucked away in the attic. In walked a cat with a mouthful of feathers. (How about that?) A dark little country store full of gravedigger’s children buying candy. (That’s how we looked that night.) The young men pumping gas spoke of his friends: the clouds. It was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh. A bird called out of a tree, but received no answer. The beauty of that last moment Like a red sail on the bay at sunset, Or like a wheel breaking off a car And roaming the world on its own.

Her hair back from the wide round face flows, almost a girl’s, so thick, caught back in combs, racing and curling through them with blackest vigor, although it is pure white. Cracked face, dusk-colored: not red but with a deep red struggling under the coming night. The eyes shift quickly, the subway train jerks and rattles, green vinyl, light flickering, silver poles. Eyes driven from ancient calm, which may fear but is never frantic and says nothing, such as looks out from the old Indian portraits—calm is the one thing missing from the beauty of her face in the black window. Those unresting eyes there talk plainly: there’s no money at home, men young and old go wrong, life almost at its end is still day by day harried and perplexed.

If I had enough cages to keep all the birds I’ve collected over the years then I would have to open a shop because there’s only so much room in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds, not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs, or the different varieties of fish, the one species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud dogs and the lone mule, the profane one who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees; and maybe he’d let the mouse I found forever dying at the end of a poem ride on his back like a whiskered Christ and if not, maybe my yeti could do it when he’s not downtown working security at the store or teaching the parrots how to say brotherhood in grunt and how to comb out the tangles and mud from his hair whose sweat reminds me of that bearded collector of  beasts with the ark who would have no doubt understood how I feel, that prophet of change under whose spell I want to confess that I’m a Christian of   the Old Testament, that my grandfather hung all his goats upside down, their throats over a bucket, and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy who strutted around the ring like a peacock with his feathered hair that stayed immaculate even on the nights he lost to our hero Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel, he who hailed from the lost tribes of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs so much we wore pigeon feathers and circled each other inside a green square of water hose until someone finally rang the bell that was never there and we sprung toward each other like animals in love or at war.

Are you of or not of brain, matter’s boss or its crevasse, are you the body itself, or more than that, immortal you, crouched in flesh, like a vampire packed into a bat? Are you housed in me or not? The tenant or the landlord of my skin? Am I your avatar? Are you my East Berlin? Are we an I or each other’s synonym? Last night, the train I was on dimmed then re-electrified, and I thought again that we are conscious a lot less often than we suppose, that half the time in us you’re half reposed. I was in South Orange again, city of my former self’s last stand. Do you remember him, your swallowed twin, the child king whom you deposed? Oh, I know: you think you’re the buried light, the jeweled glow, the sunlight falling through the falling snow. But I’ve seen the uranium laced through your walls: you’re an equation only destruction solves. Who else but you starts each day with masturbation and ends each night with gin? And so how should I begin? Four years ago, you rose in me like a fin. It started as an overflow, a drop of go, some royal beast in me, all gasoline and yeast, unhinging its own jaw to accelerate the feast, the rails of thought so greased that the outer world began to skew, as in that moment on a train when the view becomes a wash of hues. There were clues. Phantom music in the air. At times, I’d look down at my body and think, “How’d you get there?” One day, I de-napped to find myself entrapped within the tangled logic of a subway map. All day, I’d refrain, I’d double-track. I’d talk to myself and myself talked back. Was it you? That tick I felt within the trick of thought? That wick that curled itself around me, not exploding, just making a constant tick-tick-tick that finally convinced me that I was sick, that there was a cascade of toxins in the air, that there was something queer about the neighbor’s stare, that charade of signals everywhere, an air raid in the brain, something in me left unpaid, a cosmic debt in arrears. Some nights, I’d hear the voices of my parents coming near, like waves that overlapped— she’d slap him, he’d slap her back—their rage a single note that climbed its staff for years, my siblings and I in the closet with our fingers in our ears, though still I heard one night the knife drawer heaved back, as if they really might slice each other or the house in half, and then my thoughts unweaved and I began to laugh.And it is funny, isn’t it, the way that which starts as confession ends

The fellow talking to himself is me, Though I don't know it. That's to say, I see Him every morning shave and comb his hair And then lose track of him until he starts to care, Inflating sex dolls out of thin air In front of his computer, in a battered leather chair That needs to be thrown out . . . then I lose track Until he strides along the sidewalk on the attack With racist, sexist outbursts. What a treat This guy is, glaring at strangers in the street! Completely crazy but not at all insane. He's hot but there's frostbite in his brain. He's hot but freezing cold, and oh so cool. He's been called a marvelously elegant ghoul. But with a torn rotator cuff, even an elegant fawn Has to go through shoulder seizures to get his jacket on. He manages spastically. His left shoulder's gone. It means, in pain, he's drastically awake at dawn. A friend of his with pancreatic cancer, who will die, Is not in pain so far, and she will try To palliate her death, is what her life is now. The fellow's thinking to himself, Yes but how? Riding a motorcycle very fast is one way to. The moon and stars rapidly enter you While you excrete the sun. You ride across the earth Looking for a place to lay the eggs of your rebirth. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, and it's begun, and it's fun. You keep on writing till you write yourself away, And even after—when you're nothing—you still stay. The eggs crack open and out comes everyone. The chicks chirp, the poems speak—and it's again begun! Speaking of someone else for a change, not me, There was that time in Stockholm when, so strangely, Outside a restaurant, in blinding daylight, a tiny bird Circled forever around us and then without a word Lightly, lightly landed on my head and settled there And you burst into tears. I was unaware That ten years before the same thing had happened just After your young daughter died and now it must Have been Maria come back from the dead a second time to speak And receive the recognition we all seek.

Lots of contemporaries— but “me” is not my contemporary. My birth without “me” was a blemished offering on the collection plate. A moment of flesh, imprisoned in flesh. And when to the tip of this tongue of flesh some word comes, it kills itself. If saved from killing itself, it descends to the paper, where a murder happens. Gunshot— if it strikes me in Hanoi it strikes again in Prague. A little smoke floats up, and my “me” dies like an eighth-month child. Will my “me” one day be my contemporary?

It wasn’t socks missing from his feet, not elbow cloth unraveled unilaterally, not equal displacement of chin and brow, nor the eye that sat a bit lower on the right, it was his knuckle that made me weep, clove corners gone wayside, like minuscule meat hooks clawed away bits of him each shift he made, invisible a timeliness unfurled. It was his muscle torn through, festering, the prosthetic hand, finger- width dismay all across his attempted grin, left there just like that, for anyone to see—it was his mercy. In the end we’re rarely beautiful, mostly placed away from compromising situations into poses offsetting what has become of us in some gawker’s unnerving eyes. Yet, he was, is, still here in mine, and I’m human because of it. Maybe only. Maybe.