I Love a Broad Margin to My Life (2 page)

Late the next day, we went to the City

for me to talk on the radio about veterans of war,

veterans of peace. In a waiting room, women

in scarves—Muslims—were serving food to one

another. Each one seemed to have come from

a different land and race, her headdress

and style and skin color unlike any sister’s.

Silks. Velvet. Poly jacquard. Coral,

red and black, henna, aqua. Peacock.

Crystals, rhinestones. Gold thread. Impossibly

diverse cultures, yet Islam brings them together.

This corridor is an oasis on the Silk Road,

as if that thoroughfare continues through Africa,

and across oceans. An Egyptian-looking woman

held up to me, then to Earll,

a tray of fruits and vegetables. “Eid,”

she said. “Celebrate the Eid.”

I chose a cherry tomato and a medjool date.

I willed my Thank you to embrace her, go through

and around her, and enfold the other Muslims, the ones

here, and the many far away. Thank you,

Muslims, for giving food to whoever happens

among you. I’m lucky, my timing in sync with their time,

the sun setting, and a new moon coming up.

Last day of Ramadan, women ending their fast.

If not for years of practicing Buddhist silence

and Quaker silence, I would’ve chattered away,

and missed the quiet, the peace, the lovingkindness.

Happy birthday to me.

Sunday, my friend Claude

brought a tea grown by old Greek ladies.

“It cures everything.” I drink, though nothing

needs curing. “Cured!” we said in unison.

Monday ere birthday, I resolve, I shall rest

from worry and pursuit. (In childhood chasedreams,

monsters chased me. Now, I do the chasing.)

Joseph, our son, calls. In a marathon read,

he’s finished all the books I’ve ever published.

I’m the only writer I know whose offspring

reads her. “How was it?” “Good.” (“Accurate,”

said my mother.) Joseph cares for accuracy too.

He’s mailing me pages of errata: I got

the Hawaiian wrong; I got the pidgin

wrong. He’s a musician; he has the ear. I love

hearing his voice wishing me happy birthday.

“I must be getting old too; I

really like my power tools.” He’d

read again and again the instructions on how

to use a chainsaw, then cut up the pine

trees without mishap. Borders in Honolulu

sold all his CDs, and wants more.

My time in Hawai‘i, I never learned the hula,

never learned the language. Couldn’t bear

the music. Heard at evening, the music—mele

and pila ho‘okani—would stay with me

all the night and into the next day.

It hurt my chest; my chest filled with tears.

Words for the feeling are: Regret. Minamina.

(
Hun
, said my mother.
Hun
, the sound of want.

Hun
.)
Hun
the nation, lost.
Hun

the land.
Hun
the beloved, loving people.

They’re dancing, feasting, talking-story, singing,

singing hello / goodbye. No sooner

hello than goodbye. Trees, fronds wave;

ocean waves. The time-blowing wind

smells of flowers and volcano. My son has given

me the reading that I never gave my father. Why

aren’t writers read by their own children?

The child doesn’t want to know that the parent

suffers, the parent is far, far away.

Joseph says, “Don’t write about me.”

“Okay. I won’t do it anymore.”

To read my father, I’d have to learn Chinese,

the most difficult of languages, each word a study.

A stroke off, a dot off, and you lose the word.

You get sent down for re-education. You lose your life.

My father wrote to me, poet to poet.

He replied to me. I had goaded

him: I’ll tell about you, you silent man.

I’ll suppose you. You speak up if I’ve got

you wrong. He answered me; he wrote

in the flyleaves and wide margins of the Chinese

editions of my books. I should’ve asked him to read

his poetry to me, and to say them in common speech.

I had had the time but not the nerve.

(Oh, but the true poet crosses eternal

distances. Perfect reader, come though 1,000

years from now. Poem can also reach

reader born 1,000 years
before

the poem, wish it into being. Li Bai

and Du Fu, lucky sea turtles,

found each other within their lifetimes.

Oh, but these are hopeful superstitions

of Chinese time and Chinese poets.

I think non-poets live in the turning

and returning cosmos this way: An act

of love I do this morning saves a life

on a far future battlefield. And the surprising

love I feel that saves my life comes from

a person whose soul somehow corresponding

with my soul doing me a good deed 1,000

years ago.) Cold, gray October

day. I’ve built a fire, and sit by it.

The last fire. Wood fires are being

banned. Drinking the tea that cures everything.

It’s raining, drizzly enough, I need

not water the garden or go out to weed.

Do nothing all the perfect day.

A list of tasks for the rest of my working life:

Translate Father’s writing into English.

Publish fine press editions of the books

with his calligraphy in the margins and

my translations and my commentary

on his commentary, like the I Ching. Father had

a happy life; happy people are always

making something. Learn how to grow

old and leave life. How to leave

you who love me? Do so in story.

For the writer, doing something in fiction

is the same as doing it in life.

I can make the hero of my quondam novel,

Monkey King, Wittman Ah Sing,

observe Hindu tradition, and on his 5-times-12

birthday unguiltily leave his wife. Parents

dead, kids raised, the householder leaves

spouse and home, and goes into the mountains,

where his guru may be. In America, you can yourself

be
the guru,
be
the wandering starets.

At his birthday picnic, Wittman Monkey wishes

for that freedom as he and the wind blow out

60-plus candles. Used to telling

his perfectly good wife his every thought,

he anti-proposes to her. “Taña, I love you. But.

I made a wish that we didn’t have to be married

anymore. I made a wish for China.

That I go to China on my own.” Taña—

beautiful and pretty as always, leaf shadows

rubbing the wrinkles alongside her blue eyes

and her smile, sun haloing her whitegold

hair—Taña lets Wittman’s bare words

hang in air. Go ahead, you Monkey.

Wish away. Tell away. Tell it

all away. Then she kicks ass—

“Here’s your
one
to grow on!”—then

gets quiet.
She
can be rid of
him
.

But first, have it out. “So, we’re not

going to be old lovers, and old artists

together till we die. After all our years

making up love, this thing, love,

peculiar to you and me, you quit,

incomplete. God damn it, Darling,

if your wife—I—were Chinese,

would she be your fit companion in China?”

“Hell, Sweetheart, if you were Chinese,

I wouldn’t’ve married you to begin with.

I spurned the titas for you.” Forsaking the sisters.

All my sisters-of-color. O, what

a romance of youth was ours, mating, integrating,

anti-anti-miscegenating. “Bad

Monkey. You married me as a politcal act.”

“No, Honey Lamb, uh uh.

An act of artists—the creating of you-and-me.”

Married so long, forgot how to declare
I
.

I want Time. I want China.

Married white because whites good at everything.

Everything
here
. Go, live Chinese,

gladly old. America, can’t get old,

no place for the old. China, there be

Immortalists. Time moves slower in China.

They love the old in China. No verb

tenses in Chinese, present tense

grammar, always. Time doesn’t pass

for speakers of such language. And the poets make

time go backward, write stroke by stroke,

erase one month of age with every poem.

Tuesday, I cried—in public,

a Chinese woman wailing to the streets—

over the headline:
LIBBY FINGERS CHENEY
.

I gloated, but suddenly stopped moving, and wept.

The stupid, the greedy, the cruel, the unfair have taken

over the world. How embarrassing, people asking,

“What’s wrong?” and having to answer, “Cheney.

Rumsfeld. Rove. Halliburton. Bush.” The liars.

The killers. Taking over the world. Aging,

I don’t cry for the personal anymore,

only for the political. Today’s news photo:

A 10-year-old boy—his name is

Ali Nasir Jabur—covers his eyes

with his hands. He hunkers in the truck bed

next to the long blanket-wrapped bodies of

his sister, 2 brothers, mother, and father.

A man’s bare feet stick out from a blanket

that has been taped around the ankles.

I see this picture, I don’t want to live.

I’ve seen the faces of beaten, cloaked women.

Their black wounds infected, their eyes

swollen shut. Their bodies beaten too,

but can’t be seen. I want to die.

Just last week, 12 sets of bones

from Viet Nam were buried in 12 ceremonies.

At sunset, I join the neighbors—with sangha,

life is worth living—standing at the BART

station, holding lit candles, reminding

one and all that the 2,000th American

soldier has died in Iraq. Not counting

mercenaries, contract workers, Iraqis, Afghanis.

The children are quiet. How do their parents

explain war to them? “War.” A growl sound.

And the good—capitalistic?—of standing in

the street doing nothing? “People are fighting …”

But a “fight” connotes fairness, even-sidedness,

equal powers. “… And we’re being quiet, thinking

of them, and holding them in our hearts, safe.

We’re setting an example of not-fighting.

The honking cars are making good noise;

they’re honking Peace, Peace.”

            Wednesday,

birthday eve, I tried re-reading

Don Quixote
. (My writings are being translated

into Castellano
and
Catalan.
La Dona Guerrera
.)

The mad and sorry knight is only 50.

Delusions gone, illusions gone, he dies.

Books killed him. Cervantes worked on

Don Quijote de la Mancha
while in jail.

For 5 years, he was given solitude,

and paper, ink, and pens, and time. In Chinese

jails, each prisoner is given the 4

valuable things, writes his or her life,

and is rehabilitated. I’ve been in jail too, but

so much going on, so many

people to socialize with, not a jot

of writing done. The charge against me:

DEMO IN A RESTRICTED ZONE—

WHITE HOUSE SIDEWALK
. The U.S.

is turning Chinese, barricading

the White House, Forbidden City, Great Wall

along borders.

     Now, it’s my birthday.

October 27. And Sylvia Plath’s.

And Dylan Thomas’s. Once on this date,

I was in Swansea, inside the poet’s

writing shed, a staged mess, bottles

and cups on table and floor. A postcard

of Einstein sticking out his tongue.

I like Thoreau’s house better, neat and tidy.

I walked out on Three Cliffs Bay.

Whole shells—cockles, mussels, clams,

golden clams, and snails, and oysters, jewels—

bestrew the endless wet land.

I cannot see to the last of it, not a lip of sea.

No surf. “We be surfers in Swansea.”

I’ve never seen tide go out so far.

“The furthest tide in the world.” I followed the gleam

of jewels—I was walking on sea bottom—

and walked out and out and out, like the tide

to the Celtic Sea. Until I remembered: the tide

will come back in, in a rush,

and run me down, and drown me. By the time

I see and hear incoming surf,

it will be too late. I ran

back for the seawall, so far away,

and made it, and did not die on that birthday.

Not ready to give myself up.

I have fears on my birthdays. Scared.

I am afraid, and need to write.

Keep this day. Save
this
moment.

Save each scrap of moment; write it down.

Save
this
moment. And
this
one. And
this
.

But I can’t go on noting every drip and drop.

I want poetry as it came to my young self

humming and rushing, no patience for

the chapter book.