[APPLAUSE]
OK, two more poems.
One, I'd like to read this one for Janice Dewey's
wonderful class.
It's called A Portrait of Self as Nation: 1990-1991.
I have two pedantic epigraphs, "fit in dominatu servitus,
in servitute dominatus," a Latin proverb meaning, in mastery,
there is bondage; in bondage, there is mastery.
And another epigraph from George Seferis, the modern Greek poet,
"The stranger and the enemy, we have seen him in the mirror."
Let me talk a little bit about this poem.
It took me two years to write.
It began as 20 pages, but boiled down to 5.
Meanwhile, the Gulf War happened,
and I incorporated that, as well.
[LAUGHS] It began as a dramatic monologue in the tradition of--
we talked about this-- an Eliot, Browning, Frost, Shakespeare,
so forth, but in the voice of a ninth-century courtesan.
I was playing with polyphonic voices.
Later, I hoped that the voice blended with my own.
Finally, I hoped to transcend the personal voice
with a collective, historical voice.
Both speaker and addressee have multiple identities.
The beloved is the other--
the invader, the colonialists, the bad guy, the reader.
And I call this a polemical love poem in that, in a poem,
there's no room for the other's point of view, right?
Poetry is not journalism, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Furthermore, I believe that all my love poems are political.
In the Asian-American context, love
is one of the most powerful forms of assimilation.
For when one falls in love, it is
necessary to annihilate parts of one's own identity,
in order to merge with the identity of the other.
This is a powerful and dangerous form of assimilation.
A Portrait of the Self as Nation: 1990-1991.
Forgive me, head master, but you see,
I have forgotten to put on my black lace underwear.
And instead, I have hiked my slip up, up to my waist,
so that I can enjoy the breeze.
It feels good to be without, so good as to be salacious,
the feeling of flesh kissing tweed.
If ecstasy had a color, it would be yellow
and pink, yellow and pink, Mongolian skin rubbed raw.
The serrated lining, especially fine.
Like wearing a hair shirt inches above the knee.
When was the last time I made love?
The last century, with a wan missionary?
Or was it Sun Wu the bailiff; the tax collector who
came for my tithes; the herdboy, the ox,
and the bridge of magpies?
It was Roberto, certainly, high on coke, circling the galaxy,
or my recent vagabond love, driving a reckless chariot,
lost in my feral country, country.
Oh, I am so punny, so very, very punny.
Dear Mr. Decorum, don't you agree?
It's not so much the length of the song,
but the range of the emotions.
Fear has kept me a good, pink monk.
And poetry is my nunnery.
Here I am, alone in my altar.
Self-hate, self-love, both self-erotic notions.
Eyes closed, listen to that one hand clapping.
Not metaphysical trance, but fleshly mutilation.
And loving it, myself, and that pink womb, my bed.
Reading Jin Ping Mei in the "expurgated"
where all the female protagonists were named Lotus.
Those damned licentious women named us
modest, virtue, cautious, endearing, demure dewdrop,
plum aster, petal stamen.
They teach us to walk, head bent in devotion,
to honor the 5 relations, 10 sacraments.
Meanwhile, the feast is brewing elsewhere.
The ox is slaughtered.
And her entrails are hung on the branches for the poor.
They convince us, yes, our chastity will save the nation.
Oh, mothers, all your sweet epithets didn't make us wise.
Orchid by any other name is equally seditious.
Now where was I?
Oh, yes, now I remember.
The last time I made love, it was to you.
I faintly remember your whiskers against my tender nape.
You were a conquering barbarian, helmeted, halberded,
beneath the gauntleted moon, whispering Hunnish or English.
So long, Oolong, went the racist song.
Bye-bye, little chinky butterfly.
There is no cure for self-pity.
The disease is death, ennui, disaffection,
a row of flesh-colored tract homes crowding my imagination.
I do hate my loneliness, sitting cross-legged in my room,
satisfied with a few off-rhymes, sending up precious haiku
to some inconspicuous journal named The Left Leaning Bamboo.
You, my precious reader, O sweet voyeur, sweaty, balding,
bespeckled, in a rumpled rayon shirt and a neo-Troubadour
chignon, politics mildly centrist,
the right fork for the right occasions,
matriculant of the best schools--
herewith my last confession, with decorous
and perfect diction, I loathe to admit.
Yet I shall admit it.
There was no colonialist coercion.
Sadly, we blended together well.
I was poor, starving, war-torn, an empty coffin to be filled.
You were a young, ambitious lieutenant
with dreams of becoming prince of a new world order, lord
of the League of Nations.
Lover, destroyer, savior, I remember that moment
of beguilement, one hand muffling my mouth,
one hand untying my sash.
On your throat dangled a golden cross.
Your god is jealous.
Your god is cruel.
So when did you finally return?
And was there a second coming?
My memory is failing me.
Perhaps you came too late.
We were already dead.
Perhaps you didn't come at all.
You had a deadline to meet, another alliance to secure,
another resistance to break.
Or you came too often to my painful dismay.
Oh, how facile the liberator's hand.
Often, when I was asleep, you would hover over me
with your great, silent wingspan and watch me, sadly.
This is the way you want me--
asleep, quiescent, almost dead, sedated
by lush immigrant dreams of global bliss, connubial harmony.
Yet I shall always remember and deign
to forgive long before I am satiated,
long before I am spent, that last pressured
cry, your little death.
Under the halcyon light, you would smoke and contemplate
the sea and debris, that barbaric keening
of what it means to be free, as if we were ever free, as if ever
we could be.
Said the judge, congratulations.
On this day, 15th of November, 1967, Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
application ZZZZ, you are an American citizen,
naturalized in the name of God the Father, God the Son,
and the Holy Ghost.
Time assuages, and even the Yellow River becomes clean.
Meanwhile, we forget the power of exclusion,
what you are walling in or out, and to whom
you must give offense.
The hungry, the slovenly, the convicts need not apply.
The syphilitic, the consumptive may not moor.
The hookwormed and tracomaed, and the likewise infested,
the Gypsies, the sodomists, the mentally infirm, the pagans,
the heathens, the nondenominational, the colors,
the coloreds, the mixed races, and the reds,
the mutants, the communists, the usurious, the Hibakushas,
the hags.
Oh, connoisseurs of gastronomy and keemun tea.
My foes, my loves, how eloquent your discrimination,
how precise your poetry.
Last night, in our large, rotund bed, we witnessed the fall.
Ours was an aerial war, bombs glittering
in the twilight sky against the star-spangled banner,
dunes and dunes of sand, fields and fields of rice,
a thousand charred oil wells, the firebrands of night.
Ecstasy made us tired.
Sir, master, dominatrix, fall was a glorious season
for the hegemonists.
We took long melancholy strolls on the beach,
digressed on art and politics in a quaint wharfside
cafe in La Jolla.
The storm grazed our bare arms gently.
History has never failed us.
Why save Babylonia or Cathay when we can always have Paris?
Darling, if we are to remember at all, let us remember it well.
We were fierce yet tender, fierce and tender.
Thank you.