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.