Close Reading

One for tree, two for woods,        

                                                            I-Goo wrote the characters           

                               

                                               out for me. Dehiscent & reminiscent:

what wood made

                                               Ng Ng’s hope-chest

that she immigrated with

                                                                     —cargo from Guangzho

to Phoenix? In Spanish, Nana tells me

                                                           hope & waiting are one word.

                                        _____

In her own hand, she keeps

                                         a list of dichos—for your poems, she says.

Estan mas cerca los dientes

                      que los parentes, she recites her mother

& mother’s mother. It rhymes, she says.

                                                         

                                   Dee-say—the verb with its sound turned

down looks like dice

                                              to throw & dice, to cut. Shift after shift,

she inspected the die of integrated circuits

                                       beneath an assembly line of microscopes—            

the connections over time

                                                        getting smaller & smaller.

                                          _____

                                                                        

                                                To enter words in order to see

                                                                             —Cecilia Vicuña

In the classroom, we learn iambic words

                                          that leaf on the board with diacritics—

about, aloft, aggrieved. What over years

          accrues within one’s words? What immanent

                                                                        sprung with what rhythm?

Agave—a lie in the lion, the maenad made mad

by Dionysus awoke to find her son

                                    dead by her hand. The figure is gaslit

even if anachronistic. Data & river banks—

           memory’s figure is often riparian.  I hear Llorona’s agony

echo in the succulent. What’s the circuit in cerca to short

          or rewire the far & close—to map

                                                   Ng Ng & I-Goo to Nana’s carpool?

                                         ______

I read a sprig of evergreen, a symbol

                                               of everlasting, is sometimes packed

with a new bride’s trousseau. It was thirteen years

                                             

before Yeh Yeh could bring

                                                Ng Ng & I-Goo over. Evergreen

                     

& Empire were names of corner-stores

                                             

where they first worked—

                                             stores on corners of Nana’s barrio.

Chinito, Chinito! Toca la malaca—

                                                             she might have sung in ’49

after hearing Don Tosti’s  

                                    recording—an l where the r would be

in the Spanish rattle filled with beans or seed or as

                                                                         the song suggests

change in the laundryman’s till.

                                         ______

I have read diviners

                       use stems of yarrow when consulting

                                                                                    the I-Ching.

What happens to the woods in a maiden name?

Two hyphens make a dash—

                                                the long signal in the binary code.

                                             

Attentive antennae: a monocot

—seed to single leaf—the agave store years

                                             for the stalk. My two grandmothers:

                                                         

one’s name keeps a pasture,

                       the other a forest. If they spoke to one another,

                     

it was with short, forced words

                                    like first strokes when sawing—

                                             

                                              trying to set the teeth into the grain.