I Will Love the Twenty First Century

Tina Chang

Although I love the past, the dark of it,

The weight of it teaching us nothing, the loss of it, the all

Of it asking for nothing, I will love the twenty-first century more,

For in it I see someone in a bathrobe and slippers, brown-eyed and poor,

Walking through snow without leaving so much as a footprint behind.

-Mark Strand

I.

It is the new year and I’ve entered

into light and see myself, now, outside

of time standing with one hand clasped

in the other, mourning the tides.

It was a winding staircase that led

to a terrace with the most fragrant flowers.

I existed there and kept writing

the same response on a piece of paper

as if history never collapsed on itself,

as if  I were never opened.

And I say, World, as if it’s beginning just now.

II.

It’s almost night, that was a belief,

that was a bird feeding only on water,

in the puddle I was standing

on that rain-soaked terrain.

I took that bird and placed it

on the dark vein of my heart to set it free.

In my dream there were many boats.

There were people floating on a cool current

and enough boats to carry them all.

When I arrived on shore, I saw weapons.

I named the weapons: machine gun, machete,

grenade, club, razor, nails, sticks, speech, then fire.

One day, the wound was the shape of a star,

the next day, a wound in the shape of a mouth

about to praise, and another wound the shape

of a fist ready to pound the tabletop.

III.

I have seen the moon in its most vicious state:

fat, greedy, ready to drop its will and fate.

I have seen the sky around it, exhausted

of gravity and poor wages and rain.

I have seen the trees, shaken into submission,

until they could take no more. Until

they let go their leaves into ragged heaps.

We will free ourselves from the houses

that are tumbling. Here comes a woman

in an indigo sari; she appears at the doorway,

bangles jingling, sun in her eyes, while

all of her belongings pass her in the tide.

The songs inside her are a medley that plays

over and over on a phonograph, inside the ribcage,

cracking with a note too low, with a note

off key, her back bent from tending

to the songs, legs buckling from lifting

the songs above her head, arms tired

from stoking the songs to fuel the fire.

IV.

I abandon peace and choose fury

instead. Anger is the horse I ride on now

past field, field, field. Stop.

The sky enormous now, rough with clouds,

that shift inward until I’m born

in a fragile, luminous egg, the shell

flecking off and light in my hands

Everything I’ve ever done or uttered

shines and shines outward.

What would you think before the final day?

I would gather ruin and look upward

toward fire and swallow my most ancient sound.

Not a cry, but a silence that led me back closer

to seeing, the gauze of my life would wind

around me until I was ancestral, bountiful

with hurt and gratitude.

I would travel this path until I was no more,

until I fell, broke open like a radiant wound,

molecules of light, all my pages burning.

The language I knew of love and its tragic interior,

would become lost vowels and lullabies.

V.

The prehistorics drew one line to symbolize

a man, another line to symbolize a woman,

and a circle that signaled the sun which would

give their lives a name. I was born with

six different names and I held them close

to me. I stepped on them, ate them like grapes

I said them over and over until they felt

like mistakes, until they felt perfect.

I hope the curse of beauty will last.

The little twig with a flower swelling

at its tip. Its spring and I rise with my soft howls,

tears that signify a universe will die out.

VI.

How do you come to terms with what you love?

With the sea’s break against your door,

tiny footsteps and then a knock asking

to be let in, to be fed.

Because you believe in good, because you are full of grief,

because the 21st century finds you trying to tell the truth

though you are not telling the truth just yet.

VII.

In civilizations past, I was worshipped

not as a queen but as the soul’s accident.

The archeologists brushed the bones of dust

and worm and placed their magnifying glasses

to the specimen. Eyes as large as planets,

they examined me, as small as a crack in a vessel.

They whispered among themselves before they lifted

the remains, placed them by a small fire hoping

the remnants will catch the light. Perhaps

it was prophecy or history’s faulty memory.

They caught my brittle life, my tribe of people vanishing.