Poetry

The Order of Things

The debate this morning is how to say the name: most of the dead are easy, but the finally dead confuses the tongue like a bullet lodged between teeth, an unexpected pill. We, Americans, the victims again, say it backwards interchange first and last, mispronounce syllables including the middle, the one each should learn, the Hui. * In a country nothing like our country— where no one, then, is killed or lonely or aims to reclaim what he believes has been taken from him— people are trying to utter new names, decide what order they should take, make the dead seem familiar. How strained Peterson, Jocelyne, and 30 others must feel, if no one has taught you to have reverence for them, lay out the letters smoothly, elongate vowels, allow them space. * Today, the campus is riddled with ribbons, flags, disorder. There are strange sounds— no courtyards teeming with students who’ve left us waiting. Here, we’ve abandoned rhetoric and evolution; we are praying. In the distance a parcel of voices returns searching for the right words: on the lips of mourners the name is almost Seung.

Note. On April 16, 2007, Seung Hui Cho, a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, killed 32 people on the campus in a shooting spree before killing himself.

Our Animal Planet

Children are creepy crawly things. Flitting in the morning, jumping on hardwood, landing with dawn. They sing the way misfits sing, croak and chortle as day wears on, bellow and transform. At times we find them lingering against the closed or angled door. They roar and scamper past obstruction, they whinny they whine, they ride the mounted staircase well. When evening swells to meet each crevice, there they dream and pant and wait. We marvel at these brilliant things— all root and shine and time and fate.

Fast Car

That summer when the house burned down, we listened as Tracy sang, I Remember again and again and thought of the ways sound reinvented us. The song told the story: anywhere could be a kind of home. In Red Bank, long past Cherry Street, past Gus’s Barbershop and the Chinese eatery we’d order from most nights, was the green and white house that burned down later that summer, maybe in the fall. My father lived there and made ends meet with odd jobs and corner store shopping, the shag carpet haggard and orange. It wasn’t a pretty place. But the moral was beautiful: the tree-lined road with rivers and courts in the distance, city lights laid out before us, and we’d sing in unison, learning what the other loved most. When my mother would call from the thousand miles between us, I’d say we’d been driving or walking and mention what we’d seen. She needn’t worry though I wasn’t home. I slept sound and had a feeling that I belonged. That summer, the fire in us passed back and forth, one voice rounding out another, until every room was filled with music in the days before the house burned down.