2018 Academy of American Poets Prize

 

 

Take off your shoes as the bricks cool with rain. 

Think of walking towards a country house. 

If you want, imagine the bricks bright with leaves, 

whatever’s needed to stay and look 

at the sun resting behind crags of black smoke 

while soldiers half-mast the flag at Tiananmen. 

 

Don’t fret the characters: [天安门]. 

“天” is the sky: imagine it as clotheslines in rain, 

a mother shuffling about. If you must, have a smoke 

and think of your mother shuffling about the house. 

One woman (女) under a roof (安)—alone, looking 

after her child—means peace. But if you leave, 

 

know that the gates (门) won’t fret your leaving: 

you’re retracing another’s steps at Tiananmen. 

Your steps, too, will be scoured by gray-looking 

men and women assigned the erosive job of rain. 

Don’t mourn those who walked here: They housed 

their spirits in the way chimneys house smoke. 

 

Today, the red flag unfurls like smoke 

bright as blood in creek water, bright as oak leaves. 

The same images bloom behind your house 

perennially. How can you forget Tiananmen? 

Let it strike hard as rain, 

what’s unsaid among the crowd. You came looking 

 

for what brought you around the world. So look. 

Men who appear half chimney—hooks of smoke 

hooking from their noses—shoulder the rain 

like statues; they long gave up the pretense of leaving. 

The workers mourn at Tiananmen. 

The sky darkens like the windows of an unlit house. 

 

You can either leave or search, top to bottom, the house 

you’ve boarded up for fear of looking 

in its cellar, where the phantasms of Tiananmen 

linger like a grandfather’s Cutty Sark smoke. 

Save regret for letters home. Even if you leave, 

the ache, a rheumatism, will worsen with the rain.