A Way to Look Away
There’s a certain
vision of the American
dream. Tell me if it looks familiar:
a man and woman meet after the Revolution.
The man works hard for a golden ticket to Anywhere, America /
works hard in grad school / works hard to keep quiet / keep to
himself / works hard to pass muster / let pass indignities / pass
off as a man born with gold in his step / pass on someday /
pass down something / pass by ghosts of his old life / old home
turned unfamiliar. If he succeeds someday he will be a man
who grants passage to younger men luckier than him. All the while
the woman works hard to support his dream / now their dream /
accepts his ambitions are more reachable than hers. In her old life
she was a teacher doctor daughter / adopted her father’s
ambitions mother’s laments / dreamed she might be a writer
singer dancer / see a world she could not imagine / its vastness. In
their new life she is a wife waitress cleaner mother
settler / kicks her old wants aside to play
sidekick to the main character / the man. If he succeeds /
they succeed. If hisses and rattles like a snake. Inside a
baby kicks and wakes her from a dream. A
dream is a kind of vision tunneling toward the future / a kind
of blindness. Envision: headlights barreling through
a pitch-black tunnel. The place they come from
fades into pins of light. The place they go to
expands into light / so much light / all
light and nothing else. At the end
of the tunnel is a final stage.
When the curtains close
the shadows keep
dancing.
Ovine Triptych
1. Sheep
I don't eat lamb because I am one. As a kid it felt special to be
the same in both zodiacs—Chinese sheep, Western ram.
I could never get the ovine language straight.
In Chinese all ovine are 羊, a kind of sheep:
Goats were mountain sheep.
Rams were horned sheep.
I just learned rams are male, as if only males
have knives in their heads. I preferred to be a ram
because their violence felt like strength.
In China no one wants to bear a sheep—the unluckiest animal
of the zodiac. Every twelve years birth rates decline.
Even in the West we feel sheepish.
In Mandarin, sheep is a homophone for sun.
Every ovine has a sun inside, but sheep shine
their light unfiltered. Is that why we are unlucky?
So bright we burn in our own fire.
Look at me. Close your eyes against the light.
Watch it dance against the dark.
2. Horns
My mom was so proud the first time I grew horns at 10. I read it in her novel a decade after she died. After I hit a boy who was mean, she marveled that I'd learned to stand up for myself. Two years earlier I’d given all my things, even my mother’s opal necklace, to the neighbor girl, because I couldn’t say no when she asked Can I have that? I hadn't yet learned how to weld words into a tool. My mother never knew how to help me, she wrote. She was inspired by my adaptation because she never learned herself. Bighorn sheep grew large horns as a protective adaptation, absorbing the impact of clashes. I adapted like the lamb I was, young enough that my horns would grow. There's a disease where bone grows in the place of the slightest injury. Over time the bone hardens into a cage. Watch my horns curl all around me. I forged them out of the whitest flame.
3. Bighorn Sheep
When I was five we moved where all horns curled outward.
Bighorns roam sparse rocky mountains, graze city parks—
a charismatic sheep seemingly at home anywhere.
I once said I wanted to be more charismatic.
What I meant was I wanted to feel at home anywhere.
If home is anywhere, is home also nowhere?
I still remember all the words to the state song:
Home means Nevada, home means the hills
home means the sage and the pines.
Is home a place you belong to or a place that belongs to you?
All four years of college I refused to call my dorm room home.
I wasn't homesick, just petty. I didn't belong
in the rich named houses of that grand green campus,
or the beige desert where my hands got so dry
each winter they cracked and bled,
or even California where I stayed so long people forgot
I hadn’t always lived in fog.
All my life I longed for home and came up short.
What I'm saying is I belong nowhere, so maybe I can belong
anywhere. My horns grow outward toward infinity.
