In Search of My Original Face

I.

The wooden door leaned into me

whispering, I long to be turned back

into a tree. I’m tired of being

the phenomena of opening and closing.

I want to be that

which moves through.

I am familiar with this song of longing

for myself

when I had no face

and my only food was the sun.

I couldn’t cry in hunger because

I was hunger itself.

Do you remember when time was a circle

and you grew in rings inside yourself?

With no separation

between cause and effect,

your turning towards was also

your returning to.

II.

I spend my days wandering

in search of a poem. 

For the lips of an ancestor

left on the kitchen counter,

a whisper that stops time. 

A hungry ghost perched on the bed frame

eyes of the belly bulging. 

A pregnant storm, a crying

sealed in ziplock. 

I search for the knives dangling

above my heart 忍,

my hidden moanings.

Each hair on my body is

the third seeing that awakens

only when two eyes close. 

Some days when I am tender 

I’ll find an angel lying dead

on my carpet. The perfection 

of stillness so full

of the absence of magic.

An unworthy recollection,

nobody’s abandoned memory. 

There is no despair worse than 

forgetting.

No hell more quiet 

than this aborted grief.

The remains of an exorcism

is a desire to be haunted. 

Come down to me 

and build me a house 

full of all the time 

lost, not in death but in forgetting 

that we are dying. 

III.

I don’t know where memories 

are born in the body or where 

they go to die, 

what kind of home they are making inside.

Maybe they are carving cavities

causing indigestion

fraying cuticles

shedding from the scalp. 

They say life is best understood like a poem,

in the subtleties of resemblance.

And I wonder 

if I am a metaphor for my mother.

All along I’ve been searching for

the language that could hold her

as tight as the knots of 

tongues and navels,

as near to me as a braid 

of DNA or umbilical cord.

For the words vast enough 

to cross the ocean and

thin enough to stay 

like splinters beneath my skin. 

IV.

Someone once told me that Fate

lives inside a stream

of time that flows backwards. 

I have found her fecund 

body in the water undulating 

across a bed of mossy bones.

She rolls over and smiles 

knowingly at me

I’ve come to eat from her lips

all the memories of an ancestor 

drowned by seawater, her 

swallowed children.

She beckons me with 

a song of silken thunder.

Her arms dilate into dusk 

and I’m submerged 

beneath her tongue.

She undresses me by removing 

teeth, unknotting the ancient abacus. 

She threads my throat with her fingers

extracting an elixir more immortal than heartbreak.

And the children come

rising up from their drowning

and I have become the Ghost River

and I have become Fate herself.

How small and infinite

the moments between 

past and future.

When nothing has changed 

when everything was changed.  

V. 

A spider spit me out of her mouth

And I rode on her venom 

sliding down her hard belly

I am the labyrinth that leads to her desire

I reach out to touch myself 

in a wet thread of hunger.

I am the poison 

that lures

the medicine inside 

to find you.

I was born homesick, said my mother.

My well of longing 

is darker than the center 

of a star or any song.

Explain love. 

Happiness is being in love with reality

(sadness is being in love with god)

There is some part of you which never forgets 

that you are nothing but the separation 

from what was real.

It is this estrangement that makes love possible.