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Treadwinds
poems and intermedia texts
By Walter K. Lew Wesleyan University Press
Copyright © 2002 Walter K. Lew
All right reserved. ISBN: 0819565105
Chapter One
18 GENERATIONS AT SSANG-NYONG I went in white pants To the ancestral mounds. When I fell into a paddy My brain seeped. Soft-eyed oxen raised me Up to a thatched roof to dry. At dusk, the farmer's wife fed me In strips to her children. That evening, down at the makkoli house The farmer stood up in the middle of a song, Bet a hill and three daughters That no one could guess What had been dug up in his fields that day.
LEAVING SEOUL: 1953 We have to bury the urns, Mother and I. We tried to leave them in a back room, Decoyed by a gas lamp, and run out But they landed behind us here, at the front gate. It is 6th hour, early winter, black cold: Only, on the other side of the rice-paper doors The yellow ondol stone-heated floors Are still warm. I look out to the blue Lanterns along the runway, the bright airplane. Off the back step, Mother, disorganized As usual, has devised a clumsy rope and shovel To bury the urns. I wonder out loud How she ever became a doctor.
Get out, she says.
Go to your father: he too Does not realize what is happening. You see, Father is waiting at the airfield in a discarded U.S. Army Overcoat. He has lost his hat, lost His father, and is smoking Lucky's like crazy.... We grab through the tallweeds and wind That begin to shoot under us like river ice. It is snowing. We are crying, from the cold Or what? It is only decades Later that, tapping the glowing jars, I find they contain all that has made The father have dominion over hers.
MOUND 1: SILENT FOR TWENTY-FIVE YEARS, THE FATHER OF MY MOTHER ADVISES ME I Careless but not fearless You spin out for the great cities: hang-outs, libraries heavy-boned churches you never knew the magic of Subway troubadours taxicab Orphées Dump you wind-stroked in the larynx of alley after alley, contemplating Light petaling through fire escapes like your own seasons, like the one long season you hesitate to dig up and divine: Ours, and not of those Leaping by in the snow-lit mouth behind you, beyond the dumpster To swirl down numbered Aves with the cars and commerce Everything with its colors on, everything marked to leave your Own SHI heart, own mouth magic gabbing to a brick * * *
As you sprint away from me your hair lengthens, bounds, like the billowing squid-dyed flame of ocean I once saw unfurl across a kabuki stage when I was a foreign student of law at a Tokyo university. Tied to my bones your hair is taut, twists in the riven spewing hole of mud Above me, and as the sky and moon run right to the edge of the hills around my grave, and you chase The melon light down the far faces, your scalp's sinews rear and gasp: Resound before they snap, yanked snarling through the dust collapsing behind you: tendon, weeds, lizard, pod snagged In the lash at the end Of each resinous strand. Here, in the mound I hold on to this end. II Come up the dust road, Across the reservoir, along The muddy ridges of the toad-sung Paddies, past the farmer-gravekeeper's house. Tell his children rinsing Melons at the pump, you'll stop in later; Even if he greets you, do not pause For makkoli or chatter. At the burial slope's gate The road ends like an uplifted tongue. With your touch read The stele there, and climb up And bow down three times before each living Nourishing, wild-haired mound, Before each of the generations: And know clearly, sonja Our reply By the song of the crickets there. * * * The taste of rough grass And clay still curling in my mouth, I took the form of a snake Pierced your burrow, and took at last My place at the table of the dead. There, the brass-lidded bowls filled with Uncooked rice and the silver bowls Of cold broth caked over with beef fat Like a skating pond, bone ends Jutting up around Frozen, crimson marrow, Had been waiting for years to release Their light in me. Through the open back passage I saw that even the tall crocks Of soy, of thick, sweet pepper paste Had also been waiting, shoulder-deep In the cold earth pit. As I ate they embraced my tongue, teeth, gullet, In me were threshed and germinated. I finished the meal alone, Grandfather, Wept against the blood-warmed earth And sung the lullaby Father would dissolve my nightmares with... Cha-jháng, cha-jháng I dust off the photographs Cinder the incense Arrange the rice cakes And gold-flecked root I dressed you in the white ramie and cotton, Covered you with brocaded quilts, And felt and heard those things I cannot speak of yet. Cha-jháng ... And you said, "Now go home, sonja, Kyu-sung-ah! With the dark scroll I have just Unrolled for you-for you alone To peruse and be puzzled by The rest of your days. Sing of us dead, We are alive. Yes, return Now Poet SHI-IN To the text you have just Begun to write." DOWN FROM THE MONASTERY Priest Baba jabs quickly through a spill of photographs and finds a tiny sepia tint of five Korean schoolgirls in hanbok Curved together on a wild hill, sky-drunk as they gaze off Over the camera, Part of the Japanese empire. Some hold onto stalks Of pampas grass, the wind is that strong And certain clouds are about to Slide away forever. Baba slaps his feet and sighs: "That mood will never return. Too bad you didn't live then You could have fallen in love with a country girl When you were 14 or 15 and Written a beautiful sad story." He points at the most dewy-faced girl: "Maybe she was never that pretty again!" I tell him, That's my mother! I knew that, he laughs, then shuts up to not Parch their gazes. For a moment I imagine He is about to sing another bar song, But he doesn't. He makes me promise I'll read the sutras Then goes down the hall to get me cold water Because "guys" my age always eat so fast They forget to drink with their food. Baba, why did you laugh so hard? You can't even remember your mother. When you were a boy chanting Kwanseum posal, Kwanseum posal All dawn in the mountain temple, You kept saying inside Omoni odi, Omoni odi-Where's my mommy Where's my mommy When you beat all the orphan taunters With your dragon drawings And returned with the valley school's prize, A bad monk tore them up and said, "Can you make Rice with this? Will it Bring your mommy back?" Bless, you said The old ill priest who rose from his cell, Pieced the paper back together, Blew dirt off the gleaming dragon eyes, And kept winking as he praised them. Unwrapping candy, he made you promise to continue Even if he leaves soon. Baba, let's wander together-It's true we still have pictures But have lost our souls. Let us lose Our loss together And feed at last The children cold inside us. Kwanseum posal, Kwanseum posal All dawn in the mountain temple
Excerpted from Treadwinds by Walter K. Lew Copyright © 2002 by Walter K. Lew
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
