2 poems
from Adorn Thyself
The Heaviness of Life
How beautiful the city!
How ugly!
There on the other side of the street
the mosque, the largest in Asia
a white structure on the street corner remembered from my youth.
Each time coming up from the subway
the stairs full of people
the big mosque reassures me
reminds me of India
Chhoti Masjid (the Little Mosque) to the right
on the road in Khurram Nagar (Happy Neighborhood)
telling me I’m almost home.
Here, sidewalks fill with tourists, locals,
young people, their friends.
It’s Ramadan, the mosque swallows people.
Men go through the front door into the large hall
women go to the roof
where families in the apartments surrounding the park
can watch them, miniature figures,
while they eat their rice or noodles at dinner.
All the people entering the mosque are foreigners. How beautiful the city!
The mosque at the corner of the park, the only park in the city
outside of the cul-de-sacs of stony land abutting the hills,
spaces too awkward to be transformed into commerce
or the peak where tourists enjoy the view
the feeling of rising over everything—of dominion.
*
How ugly!
The building, twenty floors.
Inside its arcade, the Indian tailors.
The tout outside Indian too, I speak to him, I tell him (in Hindi)
to stop asking me to buy things, doesn’t he recognize me,
and in time he stops, smiles his greeting.
The people in the elevator speak Hindi
but they don’t speak to each other.
Then, once, in the elevator at night, two men are speaking.
“How are you doing, sir?” asks the younger, smaller man.
“Very well, very well, God is great,” replies the older man
watching the floor numbers illuminate in ascending order.
“God is always great!” replies the first.
Then, over the weekend, from the apartment next to ours,
songs, the banging of a drum, a bhajan party,
ecstatic melodies, the desire to leave the world.
*
How beautiful the city!
How ugly!
The trip from the airport too simple,
made easy for commerce.
The old airport famous for its landings,
suddenly buildings next to the wings, then the tarmac.
That city was dirty, two distinct cities.
Victoria Island. Then Kowloon
the buildings covered with filth:
the rain made them moist, the sea brought a salt brine
then the trash thrown from the windows
clinging to the sides of the buildings
congealing in the spaces between
the apartments like dirty titans emerging from the earth.
But this time, a silent train to Kowloon’s main station
then a transfer to a bus.
It’s too simple, a child could do it, a blind person,
an American tourist.
A man approaches.
He wears shorts and a T-shirt, a billionaire or no one.
He’s waiting for the bus too.
In the bus, he recounts his adventures.
He’s a call center manager in the Philippines.
From LA. He comes to Hong Kong whenever he can.
“The girls are always nice. When I go on vacation, I never sleep.
I have one night here. I’ll sleep on the plane home.”
A commercial city.
People come to buy
anything capable of being sold
without prudery.
*
How beautiful the city!
How ugly!
Before it was here, before the first buildings,
the first streets, it was just sweaty hills
surrounded by the sea, with islands and pirates in their boats
sheltering in coves, their boats so agile,
the big vessels, easy prey.
No one dreamed it up at once.
Not one person.
The city’s every fold, its every hot island.
On a rooftop balcony bar, a friend of a friend,
a businessman from Kuwait, says it’s a city without a soul,
not a place to live, it was this way from the start.
Who knows.
Now it’s a city of sanitized shopping malls.
A sign on the marble wall outside one reads,
“Do not stay here for any reason, for any amount of time.”
I have a picture to prove it.
*
How beautiful the city!
How ugly!
I go to the café to read.
A man comes in.
He approaches me. “Excuse me,” he says, in English.
He wants to talk. He teaches English in China.
He talks about his students, his girlfriend.
He’s almost old.
He has come to town to buy a certain iPad, I can’t help him
I don’t know, he gives me his business card.
*
How beautiful the city!
How ugly!
One Sunday, the park after sunset.
A little pond with a little fountain,
no animals, no toy boats, it’s not Paris.
In the beds, flowers in a botany lesson,
each plant with a sign announcing its origins
as though people would stop to learn the Latin
wanting to memorize these terms
for an upcoming test.
The park lamps give off weak light.
In the half-dark, servants and nannies sit on the sidewalks,
on the benches, in little groups
listening to their music, brought from afar
laughing quietly, imagining being back at home
with their loved ones, free of the city’s heaviness.
*
How beautiful the city!
How ugly!
What does it mean to know a person’s face?
A face changes all the time.
We recall others in a certain position
but reality isn’t like that.
“How old I look!” we say, when we look at a photo.
Then, one year removed, we think, “How young I looked!”
We don’t want to leave the world.
To describe the face of a city—
which city? which moment?
It moves, it breathes.
Beyond human control.
I look for the same buildings as before,
they’re there, but not the same.
Lying on the park bench in the late afternoon
a long weekend day alone
my friend at the Indian doctor’s posh house on the peak,
I watch the clouds perspire over the city
thinking of elsewhere
wanting the separation to be over
wanting another day to elapse
before memory can begin again.
w/Fatima
Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon
July 2014
just before the protests
Clouds Expand in the Sky
Clouds expand in the sky like the runes of a world unknown. We live beneath the clouds on a plane called terra firma. This land was once a prairie with coast live oaks in the knee-high grass. My two-year-old holds up a white colored pencil and says, “Black.” She holds up a purple pencil and says, “Pink.” If I am to be nothing more than the custodian of Sae Ah’s future, I will be happy.
*
The frigate bird flies into cumulus clouds on updrafts that last for months. Even while complimenting you, some people make you feel bad. Even while insulting you, some people make you feel good. I couldn’t tell you which is worse. Irby told me I would like A Poetics. Now Irby’s dead, and Bernstein’s a professional poet.
*
“Nothing on Earth resembles clouds so much as islands,” wrote Henri Michaux in Ecuador (1928). The LA Times article featured a young white couple, reportedly artists, who, the article seemed to say, were to be applauded for living in downtown LA and making sure that they had “artistic spaces.” “Kudos to the rich!!” might well have been its title. When we were standing at the corner of Broadway and Ocean in Santa Monica, a Mercedes at the stoplight caught Jane’s eye. It was silver plated, with opaque, tinted windows. My mother exclaimed something, and a young woman in front of us, already taking a picture on her phone, mistook her comment to be praise. She turned her body halfway toward us, and, before she caught up to my mother’s moralizing tone, she said, “That’s a dope car.”
*
When I looked up, the woman sitting next to me on the train had a phone with a screen saver of a blue background with two cartoon clouds. Today people are moving out of their apartments. Solidarity lasted six months. When I asked Lisa to sign one of her books, she wrote “in solidarity” and drew a sun. It made me think of Lech Wałęsa. People try to be good people to people on their same level. I’m on the same level as Sae Ah. When in the bathtub together, she points to my chest, and I say “chest,” she points to my forehead, and I say “forehead,” and when she points to the top of my head, I say, proud that she might be able to understand the concept, the “crown of my head.”
*
A sentence can organize the world, but so can a stanza; these stanzas are organized by clouds. This morning as soon as she awoke, Sae Ah extended her arms and demanded her strawberry kefir popsicle that we refer to as “ice.” “Aaiith!” she said, smiling, radiant. I picked her up, her torso glued to my chest. I pressed her closer, happy to be alive again. She pointed me to the kitchen, and then to the freezer, saying as we grew closer, “That! That! That!”
*
Cloud County is in north-central Kansas. Its capital is Concordia. Francisco Vasquez de Coronoda came to Kansas in 1541 to search for Quivira where there were “trees hung with golden bells”—the Lost City of Gold. Whenever someone says, “remind me to email you,” I repeat in my mind, “inshallah.” Someday soon I will have a garden the size of a small citadel where I will plant eggplants, cucumbers, zucchinis, and tomatoes. I will surround myself with people I love, and I will feed them the vegetables that I have cultivated. And I will have a fish tank for me and Sae Ah, and if our guests wish to look at them, we will let them.
*
Today there are no clouds. It’s as though someone forgot to decorate the cake before they presented it to the birthday boy. Sae Ah brushes the blue marker across the page and says, “Puddle.” I say, “Draw an ‘h,’” and she scribbles a mess and says, “H.” The man killed his wife, drove cross-country to his old school, then killed his former professor, while we waited, hunkering in the backroom, uncertain of the extent of the carnage.
*
“Once a year clouds pass in the blue sky like hooded pilgrims mumbling to themselves, they never stop here but march on to sacrifice themselves to the sun or hurl themselves into the sea …” writes Frank Wynne, the translator of Boualem Sansal’s The German Mujahid
*
The clouds gather, the sky darkens, and rain falls. My father says that the urge to talk is deeply laid within the human genome, and who would disagree with such a chatty guy? He had called to wish me happy birthday (one day late), and I said, “Thank you. I enjoy hearing it, but I like to move on quickly afterwards.”
*
The sky parted, and a new horizon emerged; the sky pulls its clouds to the side, and the chariot of the sun appears. Everyone complains about everyone talking all the time about the weather, but what of it? The problem is saving the interesting things for those who will appreciate them.
*
I hope I’m given a cloud in heaven to look at, or lean upon, depending upon heaven’s location. Yesterday before going to sleep, Sae Ah was lying on our bed with her face in our pillows. I put one of Jane’s linen sheets on top of her butt, which she was sticking into the air. “You like the feel of linen, Sae?” I said. “You think we should name your sister Linen?” I asked. “Sae and Linen—does that sound good to you?”
Los Angeles
June 2016
Matt Reeck was the Princeton Translator in Residence during Spring 2021 and won the 2020 Albertine Prize for his translation of Zahia Rahmani’s “Muslim”: A Novel (Deep Vellum). His poems have recently appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions, and Black Warrior. Selected Satire: Fifty Years of Ignorance, his translation from the Hindi of Shrilal Shukla, will be published by Penguin-India in Summer 2021. In 2022, Routledge will publish his book Description/Dispositif on ethnographic aesthetics.