Trigger Finger

You try to flex your thumb, make a circle
with your index finger, but it doesn’t

listen. Everything works on the left, but
something is stuck on the right. The hand

doctor pulls out a diagram describing
the arrangement of tendons: like

passenger cars on a train. Pulleys
allow for the ease with which they

can glide forward and back on the tracks.
Something is stuck in your thumb’s pulley

system, causing pain that radiates
from the hinge and tenderness at the base.

It hasn’t gone away, despite the different
kinds of salves friends have recommended.

When you hold a pen, your grip is awkward;
and marking student papers or signing

your name is like pushing an iron bar through
dry soil. And that train? It wants so badly

to leave the station, to climb up those hills.
Perhaps a masked man is holding the engineer

hostage, forefinger resting on the trigger.
What he wants exactly, no one can figure out.

Don’t hide your dreams in dirty pillows

Once I read a story about the poet Eduardo
Galeano’s wife Helena: how she dreamt of being

in an airport, along with everyone else
carrying the pillows on which they’d lain

their heads the night before— passing through
the screening machines, they’re purged of all

traces of dreams that might have leaked
into them, for fear they might harbor

subversive material. Can you imagine each
slip-covered mound of cotton or memory foam,

buckwheat, feather or down, moving on conveyor
belts under high-wattage light? TSA agents

no longer care if your carry-on bag of toiletries
exceeds 3 liquid oz. They don’t bother to wave

those electromagnetic wands down your arms
and legs or in the area of your crotch.

It’s kind of like a giant laundromat— lines
of unacceptable matter processed for bleaching

before being tossed out the other end:
colorless, odorless, blank as amnesia.

Self-portrait in summer, with broken-down shed and water heater

Whoever penned Ecclesiastes 3:1 must not
have had a mortgage and an older house;

must never have had to take care
of repairs. I hunt for Nextdoor

recommendations of plumbers, call around
for estimates and check prices on lumber

and siding. To everything there is
a season, it says: a time for this and a time

for that, for the orderly and equitable march
of days as well as their bloom and fade.

The stalk comes up after the seed, the flood
disappears into the plain. Should the cost

of fixing amount to another disaster?
O let this not be the time for the hot

water to go out just as the deck umbrella
snaps almost cleanly in half in a freak wind storm,

at the same time you find a snarling nest
of coons burrowed in the shed’s rotting wood

when you go to retrieve the ladder. Let the broken
fence palings keep from falling down into the service

road. Let the neighbors’ dogs poop regularly
somewhere other than the edge of the footpath

where you come and go. Look up at the sky
past the greenish cast on windows and walls

in need of power washing; at the flowers’ hot,
thirsty faces, sending out semaphores of entreaty.

Brocante

Masks adorned with bits of shell,
mud, hair, and beads; Bakelite

radios with their dials turned
to the last big band swing tune

they must have played; blue
and white patterned plates

and teapots, long-handled spoons,
silver almost pristine next to

yellowed casseroles, rusted iron
tongs and bellows— Is this where

they wind up, more public than
an estate sale: all the things

their owners held close one more time
before deciding they no longer gave that

spark of joy? Their colors, spread out
on blankets and folding picnic tables,

still have the shimmer of faded confetti
in late summer sun. You ask a woman

sitting on a truck bed C’est combien?
pointing to a simple chair with rubbed-

out carvings on the seat and back. When she
hands you change from a ten, you wonder

at your luck and hers; and what it takes for one
thread to unravel from a cardigan, for the missing

piece to turn up in a drawer after the puzzle
no one could ever finish is thrown in the trash.

Unreadying

How do we prepare for the great
projected calamities of our century,

the ones we can’t even imagine yet
could be more devastating than tremors

in the earth, more than fire in the almond
groves or poison lining the lips of wells?

Out west and farther south, heat swells
the mercury in the glass; screens fill

with an acreage of dust while elsewhere,
roots of plants explode from a surfeit

of moisture. How much of our greedy
treasures will survive fire or flood?

From instinct, carpenter bees drill
into the soft undersides of wood; small

animals trip over the trash when motion
sensor lights wash the driveway’s edge.

Every iris widens more in darkness: and yet
we ask if there’s nothing we could do

to stop from happening what’s bound to happen;
if there’s nothing we could keep from change.

 

In response to Via Negativa: Soporific.

In a shoe store in Aachen, thinking of what subjects we should be able to write about

When Chen Chen writes about being told
by a friend: All you write about/ is being

gay or Chinese, I want to jump up, wave
my hand in the air, and co-testify. I can’t

count how many times I’ve been told All
you write about is being a mother or Filipina

or being from Baguio or Filipino, or brown
and Filipino— which is really kind of

the same thing. I remember a graduate
student who once told me (I think admiringly)

You write about suffering so well
which set the little bell of Auden ringing

in my ear, but which immediately I felt
guilty for even thinking, because who am I

to even ascribe what I know about poetry
or about life or anything as anything

that might earn me the right to be called
an old master? And as far as my particular

kind of suffering, which many have also
described without irony as the suffering

of “my people”: of course I know
that long, dark braid goes back to the

history of being conquered many times over,
but reappears as both shadow and fantasy

wherever I go— For instance, at parties,
when I’m treated as though I’m incapable

of having conversations on topics other than
the plight of maids in Hong Kong. And in a store

on the German border, surrounded by the warm
tannin smell of pair after pair of sneakers, sandals,

and booties, I buy shoes not for any weird connection
to some former dictator’s wife but just because

pretty shoes! unusual style and color! or recently,
learning the difference between double and triple welt

and that a last is the mould of your foot, the soul
of a shoe. At first the new leather is stiff; then

with use, over time, it comes to know the exact
shape of your feet: a history you’ll wear, all your own.

What we think of when we’re told Go Home

Pinewood slats pulled up
from where they met the front door,
then re-laid on the horizontal.
Something about the grain running
like water out into the street otherwise,
taking all the household luck with it.
Across from us at #5: two magnolia trees
we were sometimes allowed to climb.
Creamy flowers opening to a handful
of droopy matchsticks at the center.
Their opulent breath.

Metallic taste of water
from a drum whose mouth was always
open to the rain. Did I say rain?
June to November, nights
of flooded lagoons, canned
sardine rations, boiled rice.
On our street: the engineer
married to a white woman who wore
only blouses and long skirts.
She pressed coins into our palms
when we went caroling— bottlecaps
strung on a piece of wire, jangled
accompaniment to our tinny voices.

The retired judge walking up
the road in a suit of alabaster
sharkskin. Tremors in the hands
of the man next door: butterflies
trapped in the blinds. We used
to say: were we sediment
at the bottom of the cup
that was our valley? After
the great earthquake, looking
at rescue helicopters’ dragonfly
wings hovering above city ruins,
some of us left; some stayed.

Appendix

An amber-colored vial, stoppered.
I couldn’t tell what floated in the water—
some tendrils, some gauzy substance.
Mother said the doctors let her have it.
Meaning, that bit of her own excised flesh,
that little pocket meant to catch stray bits
until it nearly burst: so much smaller than a heart,
that little pocket meant to catch stray bits:
meaning, that bit of her own excised flesh.
Mother said the doctors let her have it:
some tendrils, some gauzy substance.
I couldn’t tell what floated in the water.
An amber-colored vial, stoppered.

Those early years in the city

like being on a movie set— cliche

of high rise apartments: cheap rates,
old, coin-operated laundry machines

in the basement; predominantly tenants
of color— students, interns, clerks,

transients, restaurant workers. Riding
up elevators like rising through

a fifteen layer cake warm with the scents
of curry and shoyu, fried onions, fish

sauce. Night and day laced with the alarm
of sirens from the Veterans’ Hospital

on the west side, the county hospital across
from the train station entrance— the same

one where they filmed a few scenes for
The Fugitive, Harrison Ford caught in a fugue

composed of Big Pharma and a one-armed man.
Everyone coming and going at all hours: nurses

with 16 hour shifts, sari-clad mothers
laden with grocery bags, salesmen stumbling

into the building near midnight. One
sweltering summer evening broken by sheets

of warm rain: and three brown-skinned exchange
students dare each other to go out on the bit

of grass near the entryway, to bathe their limbs
and upturned faces like they used to back in their

island home. The doorman on duty lights a lazy cigarette,
calls Hey! Do you want me to teach you some English?

They run back through the revolving door,
punch the elevator button and disappear.

My hands, like jumper cables,

my friend explains; they try to get

blocked energy moving again. I lie
on a massage table, eyes half-

shut in a room where the shades
have been drawn against summer light.

Though it doesn’t whinny, I know
there is a dark-maned horse that nibbles

on bleached grass behind a stone wall
in the high field adjacent; I’ve seen it,

on looking out the window early mornings.
Now, my friend taps along certain meridians,

fingertips listening to the body’s pulses
the way a car mechanic might turn on

the ignition to check for engine sound.
I try to imagine what this circuitry

might resemble: the points between heart
and liver and spleen and hand and foot

then back again, the kinds of traffic
moving with different speeds through

the branches. Sometimes it’s hard to believe,
or maybe I’ve just forgotten: how the tight-

ness in my limbs hasn’t always been there, nor
the feeling of a dam about to burst in my chest.

~ for M.