Native tongue
By

    grandfather –
    forgive me for my impiety.
    perhaps I should have learned better from my
    books of Confucian tales but
    I once found these bones too heavy –
    too waterlogged with black earth –
    to seek the arts that you had painted there.


    is it improper to say:
    that if I cried, it wasn’t for your sake?
    that even now, I do not know your name –
    that I cannot tell how many years have passed –
    that I once ate fruit that had been left as an offering to you –
    that another grandchild’s name would look better on your gravestone –
    that even when I try, I am unable recall your voice –


    what I remember is this:
    the smell of cigarette smoke and a terrible indifference;
    disappointment that my first death had been yours and hardly better
    than a stranger’s;
    and


    my father
    taking slow steps through our backyard
    clasping his hands behind his back in the pose of a scholar
    as serenely as he always did but
    the expression on his face was so
    unfamiliar


    it was too dark to see anything else
    perhaps I imagined it
    maybe I imagined everything


    it was night time in Texas and
    the stars were the same as they ever were.


    forgive me, grandfather –
    you never cross my mind except when i cross oceans
    to burn paper at your grave and when i do
    I can suddenly recall a thousand, ten thousand, prophecies of
    dragon bones and turtle shells;
    ancient scripts pressed into bronze in a language that once reminded me of the
    delicate ink wings of birds and insects –
    a once-strange tongue whose forms I no longer fear.

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