Father, Farther: 1986
“feed him the land, that is what they’re fighting for…”
Evening raid on a day I don’t exist yet
It is hot as a crucible my grandfather dragged
out of the house arrested for possessing
illicit maps of the new state for harboring
a party of separatist leaders who sit
smoking evenings in our teahouse
biding headcounts of the vanished
Across the border my mother hurries
my father to the market for salt to make dinner
On the way he meets the man he reports to
at the Army Welfare Project & this man
insists on buying my father a drink
Meanwhile my mother’s waiting
begins & in her wait a blue chasm opens
Opens to where her father-in-law his feet
noose-tied through a fan hook yanked
upside down is stripped naked waterboarded
before they pummel him in the chest in the
stomach Later of course they’ll feed him
fresh shovelled earth until it plugs
his windpipe & he cannot spit
soil can only will himself unconscious
as the taste grows familiar Like all men
who’ve seen death come walking
on bare hands my grandfather dreams
a bright long dream he is wincing
as his eldest daughter cleans the caked
blood off his eyelids with alcohol
With alcohol the more he drinks
my father is farther away from dinner
from my mother waiting in the small
unheated quarter-house How she moves
in front of a tall mirror touches the bindi in place
& something else — reaches for a sound
of me in her womb I’m not there
yet — the swept floors of her sorrow
the aftersigh not me but her firstborn
stilled on arrival And my father now
begins to tell a story to the man
who asks Why are you people
making a fuss about a new state?
Look he whispers this country of savages
Savages & us sitting here warming
our bellies with their brandy us honest men
from two countries One thing he won’t
tell my father: the other my father
won’t correct: why the ladder for men
like him is designed sideways
why they are two men honest hardly but
from the same nation state of famine
& floodsong Instead my father feels
a need to go further back & here he is
telling another drunk about the time
he was a little boy staking out acres of land
against armed policemen in the middle
of a teeming forest with my grandfather
Grandfather herding my grandmother
my father & the daughter to the jungle
instructing all his men to do the same so
the police don’t resort to beating & blinding
This land they’d been clearing patiently
for months & how on the ninth day
the daughter vomited the fever
black as the damp night fell asleep
in her & never woke My father remembers
the bloating belly her thirteen-year-old
body thrashing long hair & pale skin
flaking in the heat My father meant
to make a point through this his story
but he’s drunk & the changkhang shutters
The shutters come down two a.m.
my father stutters uphill coat folded
over shoulder Mother waiting on
a wicker chair outside dew softening hemline
of her petticoat cold rage turning her
white & that moment Grandfather’s eyes
blink open tears have rivered back down
his forehead in a pool of red on the floor
he’s been weeping in the soil-dark
sleep of the bats Now bewildered
awake his chest breaks a ground-
swell of black horses as he remembers
he’s sent him slow son across the border
where rifle barrels calcify in the long rust of peace
