Christmas is coming and I think of home:
A colonial Christmas and second-hand nostalgia
As simple as home-made cottonwool snow,
Paste holly and a cheap plantic conifer.
Where Christ is born in odd conditions,
To customary churches and celebration.
O silent, holy night, we sing, beneath
The clear hot equatorial sky.
Where, as everywhere, even to the hour of birth,
Soldiers keep watch. Frivolity
Is circumscribed by birth, by death.
 

‘Alone on a wide wide sea!’ he wrote;
And we, reading this, wonder if he’d known
What it was all about. How then could be
With this passion live, frightening
Every stranger, the strange old sea-dog?
Or else made passionate monologue,
Out of harm’s way, harmless, trusting
To construct passing and indestructible,
Word upon word, felicity?
Remembering too, the wished-for return,
The forgiving priest, the willing pilot,
The throng by the harbour, curious, appalled –
We could hope this was; but know here
Like the passing stranger, only pity, fear

The painter caught the dumb mouth,
Fixed, in a man out walking
Down a road- one moment past,
Pleasantly, he was musing,
With the sun shining south
Behind him-air and hill
Were drawn together
In blue and green paste
When the painted mouth is stilled.
Afflicted by knotties
Pigment, the eye, off-guard,
Suffers and and goes mad,
In rigor mortis.

If you come to a land with no ancestors
to bless you, you have to be your own 
ancestor. The veterans in the mobile home
park don't want to be there. It isn't easy.
Oil rigs litter the land like giant frozen birds.
Ghosts welcome us to a new life, and
an immigrant without home ghosts 
cannot believe the land is real. So you're
grateful for familiarity, and Bruce Lee
becomes your hero. Coming into Fullerton,
everyone waiting at the station is white. 
The good thing about being Chinese on Amtrak
is no one sits next to you. The bad thing is
you sit alone all the way to Irvine.

I have been faithful
To you, my language,
Language of my dreams,
My sex, my laughter, my curses.
How often have I
Stumbled, catching you
Short when you should be
Free, snagging on curves,
Till fools have called me

My father's sadness appears in my dreams.
His young body is dying of responsibility.
So many men and women march out of his mouth
each time he opens his heart for fullness,
he is shot down; so many men and women
like dragons' teeth rising in the instance
of his lifetime. He is an oriental. He claims
paternity. But in his dreams he is a young body
with only his life before him.

My father's sadness masks my face. It is hard
to see through his tears, his desires drum in my chest.
I tense like a young man with a full moon
and no woman in sight. My father broke
with each child, finer and finer, the clay
of his body crumbling to a drizzle of silicone
in the hour-glass. How hard it is
to be a father, a bull under the axle,
the mangrove netted by lianas, the host
perishing of its lavishness.

"At present, the phenomena of butchering, drowning 
and leaving to die female infants have been very serious." 
(The People's Daily,Peking, March 3, 1983)

They say a child with two mouths is no good.
In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
Smooth, gumming, echoing wide for food.
No wonder my man is not here at his place.

In the slippery wet, a hollow space,
A slit narrowly sheathed within its hood.
No wonder my man is not here at his place:
He is digging for the dragon jar of soot.

That slit narrowly sheathed within its hood!
His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze
While he digs for the dragon jar of soot.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days.

His mother, squatting, coughs by the fire's blaze.
The child kicks against me mewing like a flute.
We had saved ashes for a hundred days.
Knowing, if the time came, that we would.

The child kicks against me crying like a flute
Through its two weak mouths. His mother prays
Knowing when the time comes that we would,
For broken clay is never set in glaze.

Through her two weak mouths his mother prays.
She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood,
For broken clay is never set in glaze:
Women are made of river sand and wood.

She will not pluck the rooster nor serve its blood.
My husband frowns, pretending in his haste
Women are made of river sand and wood.
Milk soaks the bedding. I cannot bear the waste.

My husband frowns, pretending in his haste.
Oh clean the girl, dress her in ashy soot!
Milks soaks our bedding, I cannot bear the waste.
They say a child with two mouths is no good.

Susie Wong was at the Starlight Haven,
the Good Times Bar and Sailors Home.
It was always dark at noon:
you had to blink three times before
you could see Susie standing by
the washed chutney jar half-filled
with ten and twenty-cent coins.
When the bar was empty her eyes were sad
and she'd mop the formica tables,
dry a row of tall Anchor Pilsner
glasses. The wet cloth slap-slapped
like Susie's japanese slippers
over the dirty floor.
Then the swing-doorsbang and the darkness is full of white
uniforms, full of cold Tigers
sweating in warm air-conditioning.
I think of the flutter in Susie's pulse.
Buy a drink, Tommy boy! G.I. Joe!
Yankee Doodle! Howdy Doody! Romeo!
and suddenly Johnny Mathis
like black magic is crooning "Chances Are."
Her girlish voice is soft and happy,
soft like a tubby belly after
six babies and ten years of beat-up
marriage, happy as only Singapore
Susie Wongs can be, when Johnny
and Ray are rocking the bottles
and their tops pop off and the chutney
jar is singing chink, chink.

The red-faced brawny men are laughing 
at her voice. Quack, quack, they laugh
so hard they spill Tigers over
the plastic counter. Quack, quack, fuck, fuck.
Susie looks at the bar-man who makes
his coolie eyes dumb black stones
and wipes up the yellow puddles
without a grunt.
Thirty years laterI hear mother singing "In the sweet
bye and bye." She is a Jesus woman
grown up from bar-girl. Sailors and Tommies
have disappeared from her Memory Lane.
I still keep the bracelet mother gave me,
gold saved from beer spilled on the clean
tables, her clean lap. I savor the taste
of that golden promise, never to love men
in white who laugh, quack, quack.