One of the conceits I write from in this sequence
is that my grandfather Kubota knew
of the poets of Angel Island in San Francisco
Harbor, the Chinese immigrants who were incarcerated
and detained sometimes up for years in the barracks
at Angel Island.
Here's a ship from China docking at Angel Island.
And those, that's the barracks, the picture of the day.
Here are some Chinese immigrants waiting
for vaccination and the commander of the post there.
And these are the poems they carved on the walls
at Angel Island.
It became one of the things that they did was they made poems up
and they transferred them from their paper composition
or oral composition to these carved ideograms
on the walls of the wooden barracks on Angel Island.
These were discovered and then preserved
and you can go there today and see them.
They've been translated of course by Mark [Him Mark Lai]
excuse me--
Mark [Him Mark Lai] and Marlon Hom
into wonderful, wonderful English poems, in two books.
One is called Island, and the other
is called Gold Mountain Songs.
So Kubota writes to these detainees.
"Kubota to the Chinese poets Detained on Angel Island."
"My geography does not match yours, surrounded by the Bay,
and the city so close you could see it from the hill of Island.
I am at the middle of an ancient sea, raised up out of water
to make a dusty land of red and pink rock,
yellow cliffs, and snow peaks, far from the great ocean you
cross from your home villages.
But we spend our days alike, gazing at bare walls
composing poems to carve on them,
bedding down at night to the whistling of wind
through bars and barracks.
When the moon shines and insects chirp under our bunks, grief
and bitterness wrap around us like cold winding sheets
and we rage against the whites, and the promises
this land made to us.
It would be a heaven of gold mountains.
It's hard living through confinement.
Our family is not near, interrogators
trying to catch us in stories that do not
match what your immigration papers say that do not match
lies informants have said about me.
Can you remember how many steps to the duck pond?
How many houses were South of the village well?
Which older brother died in the year of the ox?
They asked me about the ink stone and the radios
in my house the FBI took on December 8,
about the military school I attended in Hiroshima, though I
was born in the US like them.
We tried to act bravely, as we were taught,
chest full of blood, but we are not heroes.
The wild geese of the Bay echo your cries.
The coyotes mimic mine and only ghosts escape these places,
rising from the cold bodies of men
who hang like butchered meat in the lavatories, pale light
shining through the thin gauze of their bodies.
They will see their families, but only from the clouds.
I pity them, but share my dreams with you, poets of island,
trapped beneath the guard towers of history.
When they ask you your brother's name, say, it is Kubota.
When they asked me what light attracts the fish at night,
I will answer, the light of angels from Island.
When they ask what fish come to the light,
I will say a fish that swims the river of heaven."