The Binding

after “Isaac, After Mount Moriah” by Saeed Jones

In Macau, my father is a boy again. He wears yellow slippers, calls his mother’s name, a new language in the seam of his tongue, torn loose, wild again. Here is the road we look at in pictures, the dirt writhing out the cracks, concrete unpaving itself along the length of my father’s memory. The house was never gone. It rises on its wooden beams, three families making again their lives among it. In the village, we all share the same last name. Every child, a resurrection. I wear each namesake’s face, hold my father as a father would. How could I be anyone’s son? He tells me he woke once, in a schoolyard with blood running from his head, the bricks an older boy used to beat him lying in the dirt. Now, he watches the first snow fall in Chicago, braces against the wind. I never call. Why would I go back? he says. Why would I ever go back?

I Google my mother’s hometown and find pictures of a restaurant.

The girls at school made fun of my English, stepped on my shoes while I
walked home.

My mother, each year, fills the house with binders, pencils, bound sheets of paper.

I was arrested once, stealing school supplies from the store. We had no money.
What else could I have done?

Popo, in the kitchen, teaches me to make bao. My mother leaves the room.
She does not respond to her Chinese name, not anymore.

Once, when we were children, your uncle chased me around the dining room table,
holding a knife in his hands.

Isaac, in the grass on Mount Moriah. Begs
the dirt to cover his face.
I imagine the blade came silent.
The boy, too, must have been silent.
Each day, we practice our aloneness.
The father, the razed mountain of his palms.
The son who lives to become old.
The ram slain beneath them both.

My mother, at two years old, was thrown into a well.
This is true.
It was her grandmother who did it. She was the second daughter,
she was a curse.
It was her father who saved her, but no.
Every hand that hadn’t held her wrung a breath out,
weighed heavy in the hollow of her lungs.
She saves herself.
Drags her body out the mouth of a well.

Look. There must be another story.
Sometimes I see myself in a dress, something flowing.
I stand alone in a low field
filling slowly with water.
Moss grows along my skin, reaches
up the inside of my thighs, swallows a hipbone.
A rose blooms in the dip of my collarbone.
Look.
Every mouth names its sacrifice.
Watch me raise
a child from the dead. Watch me
clean my teeth each morning.

First Theory

Mom’s first theory for why I’m sad
is because I can’t see from my right eye.
I don’t think that’s it. I spent years of afternoons
staring through walls into the garden overgrowing
in Palolo, believing I could see clear
through brick. None of it has left me: the bird-of-paradise
hollowed out by ants, my blood in the grass sprinting
through a rose bush. Anna Popo slipped me fives
between frying jian dui with Popo Yim. They once supplied
desserts to Chinese restaurants all around Kaimuki.
Over time, I learned to put up a fight when offered
a gift. Gongong Yim calls my father to say we forgot
to burn Popo a house five years after her funeral.
I am trying to build a table in a city where I live alone.
Gongong still takes the bus on his own to visit her
in Kaneohe. He’s stubborn when his children
ask him not to run across the highway.
I come home once a year to a little less family.
Anna Popo was my cousins’ grandma. Uncle Robert’s
mother. Her eyes held the softest welcomes.
I abandon my table in this city where I live alone.
Sometimes Gongong misses his stop and wakes up
on the North Shore. In Lahaina, the largest
banyan tree in America is ash. One hundred and fifty
years of breath. Her service will be next Thursday.
The support beam isn’t fitting the table like it’s
supposed to. I am already waking up tomorrow.

On Day One, I Quit

On day one, I quit the Cub Scouts.
It was tradition to howl at the end
of each meeting. I refused to howl.

Mom held me in the parking lot.
Inside, the pack whooped and cried,
animal brothers under the moon.

I don’t remember if Mom ever got
her deposit back. Across the street,
Sacred Hearts Academy rang its bells

on the hour. The last scene of Lost
filmed in their chapel. Light shone
through its arch and a man walked

into heaven. In Illinois, my father
and I spent our only winter together.
I slept on the living room floor

and woke to passing freight trains.
That week refused to carry snow.
Sixty on Christmas, we drove back

and forth through melting suburbs.
He told me about a distant aunty
who’d died suddenly when bitten

by a dog. This was back in China.
I’ve let this country sit between us.
Its melodramas and indoor malls.

Fields of wheat beset by family cars.
We passed house after bright house
flushed with lights but no sound.

Second Theory

In the dusty attic of my fake house, the child I don’t have
is digging through cardboard boxes tenuously held
by duct tape decades older than they are, asking me
what is this? and what is this? and holding up relics
of my several quarter-life crises, now made to account
for themselves in the cold December light I let drift
into this scene. Surely I once stood with my parents
on the wooden floor of an attic we didn’t have
and put them through this same ritual scrutiny, held
their past lives and blew off the dust to see
what I could name on my own. And probably, likely,
they did this with their parents who did this with theirs
in something like an attic or cave or boat taking on water
while crossing some river from which all my life springs.
And really way worse than the litany of embarrassments
dumped right on the floor are the things I have
no quick answer for, things which severely undermine
my fatherly aspiration to seem like I know anything
at all, like when you, fake child, held up that plastic thing
with the dark beveled handle and gently sloped blade
and I channeled my own father’s bullshit and said we used
it for . . . digging up vegetables? while I texted my mom
and she said . . . popping pimples? while she texted her mom
who said we used to have to use our bare hands while she
texted her own mom from beyond the grave who sent back
rather quickly 這是緊急情況。which we all assumed
meant something something something uphill both ways
but what really scared me was when you picked up the lock
and called it a lock and I told you for keeping things in
and you looked up and told me for keeping things out.

Thaw

and still another gloveless winter
dark lung dragging north across my skin
always cracked palms always rag and rough will
still all i know of warmth is weather is wait and
H. says we all know boys got broke hands bent
fingers says   we all seen boys thrashed against
their own walls all seen boys all splintered
all grown all wrong   and i unearth my scraps
in threadbare genes and recall tackling my father
gilded memory his bones bound in wood
flooring held beneath me my borrowed hands
he knows this hold he sang to us in sleep
and come fall my mother sends another son
to upstate new york and i am digging for hand-
me-down coats to ship home to call   brother
i do not know how to celebrate how to praise
to cup his name spilling through my fingers
watch the trees swallow a season whole
its ragged maw rawknuckle along the throat
beg the light back in