by Rolf Parker-Houghton and Phayvanh Luekhamhan
published in Poets Ink, October 2008
Lantern Review has finally published their first issue! Check it! It’s a beautiful website, and I hope the editors remain enthusiastic about their project, as I would love see how the Asian American poetry movement gets documented by them over time.
They’ve chosen to publish “Sunken Garden Exit Ghazal”, which was written by 5 of us Kundiman fellows while on retreat at Soul Mountain in 2008. I’m honored, of course. Also intrigued that LR intends to feature at least one new collaborative piece in each issue. I’d be interested to see what else others are writing and what their processes are.
The poem is co-authored by: Matthew Olzmann, Tamiko Beyer, Bushra Rehman, and Soham Patel.
I am a fan of writing collaboratively. Two pieces that I wrote with Rolf Parker-Houghton were previously published online at Poet’s Ink (October 2008), which I’ll post here later (they are no longer available at the PI site).
girl on the platform meditating
Seems like ages ago that I wrote this poem, and just as long that Jennifer Karmin put it into action as part of her “Walking Poems” project in Chicago. It’s recently published on How2. Check it out.
I know I’ve grown so much as a poet since the writing and submission of this poem, but it still retains sentimental value for me. I wrote during my brief little tour of New York City in January of 2006. A country girl from Vermont in the big City for a weekend, I sent short emails home to my friends of my first impressions:
Finally got a taste of a real chocolate souflee, which I'd been dreaming about since the dessert party this summer, where it was noticably absent from the menu...found myself in an apartment with two guys playing Go, and a woman about to leave for Bejing early the next morning. the smell of take out lingering in elevator carriages, the sounds of unidentifiable languages, people so familiar yet not my own. I could walk a long time down these hard gray streets before I needed rest. Bent pizza boxes, posters weathering off the walls, jewel-colored lamp shades in the park, the ghost of myself in the windows I walk past. So much tactile sensory information.
I had taken the trip to New York to read at a Kundiman-sponsored event at Verlaine. I stayed with another Kundiman fellow, Rona Luo. I had drinks at the Telephone Bar, where fellow Kundis were reading. We went to Chinatown for dinner and ice creams.
I was broke and dreamy-eyed. I had been practicing daily meditations on gratitude and love. And as I waited for the train, I closed my eyes…
Slept in, per Rona's suggestion. Squatted on the station platform and meditated in the sun. Gorgeous no jacket day. Perused bookshops, killing time before lunch. Mongolian pepper steak, halo halo, Thai iced tea, gossip and poetry shop talk with one of the most beautiful women I know.What do I want? Someone who is comfortable in his body, and who can cherish mine. We ate next to fish the size of my head in their blue tank.
Oh, how young and dreamy I was then. And in love with every new experience!
The luggage is in the car, trunk packed
with boxes and bags like building blocks,
as if leaving was just another game,
this turn toward the open road.
If we were in first grade and this was “house,”
I would be departing for work, you
the library. And after the long recess
apart, we’d meet lips chastely, having the promise
of our whole lives together
to get it right. If this were play,
I’d say to you, kiss the kids for me–I’ll be late,
again. I’d disappear around the bookcase,
hide in my pretend office, distract myself
with colorful picture books, dial a toy phone
to my secretary and look out the window at the rain, the birds.
If I hadn’t forgotten, I’d return to you
whom I hardly know, and you’d be there
on the flowered rug in your socks, reconstructing
the wooden pieces we’d built together, adding rooms.
In practice, we never fought–my words never bore knives
or chased you. I never sat at bars unraveling myself
to strangers, to women who defied lovely. You never sulked
in a nightshirt, overspent. You never smacked
a swath of your child’s skin, made it burn.
If we’d have understood the purpose
of a door, the reasons we return to open it,
the step into devotion, my car would not steer away.
You would not stand so tall, my final backward glance.
in the Meadows, they dipped their bony heads
to the grass and pulled them by roots
into their warm pink mouths
they were black and white and they mooed
an inconsistent chorus and they spilled
from under the red eaves, lazy sun bathers
the herd in their stanchions milked
by hands that had also thrown hay
and smoothed their high splotched hides
they were black and white and they moved
like slow drunks in search of a seat
they huddled in dots along the Meadows
and they steamed in the evening chill
where they would still spot the fields
had the trucks not come to empty the farm
The Commons, February 2007
