My Mother’s Happiness
I walk backward into the future where I am greeted by my dead mother
Life wasn’t always this good, it was much better before you were born.
Two sick birds nestle in my hair and neither will ever fly. I am almost a poem.
Will you ever marry, whispers my mother, to a figure I can’t see
Life wasn’t always this good, it was much better before you were born.
My dead mother says: I know what you’re thinking and then disappears
Will you ever marry, whispers my mother, to a figure I can’t see
Sometimes being Chinese means you know how to speak English
My dead mother says: I know what you’re thinking and then disappears
She shed her Chinese name on the ship to America and never told me
Sometimes being Chinese means you know how to speak English
Come sing to me of her blackened syllables turning to rain and ash
She shed her Chinese name on the ship to America and never told me
I walk backward into the future where I am greeted by my dead mother
Come sing to me of her blackened syllables turning to rain and ash
Two sick birds nestle in my hair and neither will ever fly. I am almost a poem
Untitled
I drank the orange juice you hid
on the bookshelf the last time
you were here. It was warm
and not particularly delicious
and I savored it. I wanted to ask you
if you put the glass where it fit
or if you had something else in mind.
Maybe the glass moved on its own
as they do in a séance.
and I haven’t tuned into its voices
I found it stuck between
the Egyptian Book of the Dead
and the Tibetan Book of the Dead,
a headless column.
I smiled,
Didn’t I tell you
That I never drink orange juice?
Rondel
The head inside the box inside my head is balking again
Statistics, shifting weather patterns, rising dunes
Spreading red plumes in celebration of their manhood
As if that were a thing you could obtain, a song
You could sustain, natural gas, what a gasp it was
Mournful as the birds greeting us at dawn
Is the head inside the box inside my head squawking again
Pulchritude, did you just say multitude, I said nothing new
To report, I said why are you walking away, why are you talking away
Are you not dead, thing of incomparable beauty.
Thing of a lot past that never was or will
Let me begin again, let me begin
As if such a thing exists said the head inside the box
Inside my head always knocking
Always asking if I can hear what I am praying for
And why am I braying on this moonless night
Old man I may be the box inside your head
The bundle of bags you drag behind you
But you are the head inside the box I carry under my arm
The voice that never rises to the surface of being heard
The voice that cannot give shape to the sweltering day
John Yau
Poet, art critic, and curator John Yau has published over 50 books of poetry, fiction, and art criticism. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts in 1950 to Chinese emigrants, He has published Crossing Canal Street (1976), Corpse and Mirror (1983, selected by John Ashbery for the National Poetry Series), Edificio Sayonara (1992), Forbidden Entries (1996), Borrowed Love Poems (2002), Ing Grish (2005; described by Robert Creeley as a “brilliant train of wildly divergent thought.”), Paradiso Diaspora (2006), Exhibits (2010), and Further Adventures in Monochrome (2012). Yau’s work frequently explores, and exploits, the boundaries between poetry and prose, and his collections of stories and prose poetry include Hawaiian Cowboys (1994), My Symptoms (1998), and Forbidden Entries (1996). A noted art critic and curator, Yau has also published many works of art criticism and artists’ books. Yau has received many honors and awards for his work including a New York Foundation for the Arts Award, the Jerome Shestack Award, and the Lavan Award from the Academy of American Poets. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram-Merrill Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a Chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters by France. Yau has taught at many institutions, including Pratt, the Maryland Institute College of Art and School of Visual Arts, Brown University, and the University of California-Berkeley.
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