from Apology Engine
We can apologize directly to poems for so much, but they rarely
apologize back to us. Some of the poems I love most are horrifying
to me. Please tell me, for the love of god, why is the peignoir so
complacent? I beg the poems for closure and tell them how much
they’re hurting me. I buy daffodils and chocolate at the grocery
store, leave them at the poem’s doorstep. But the gesture is never
reciprocated. While every poem has the potential to make an
apology, like people, most of them are actually so busy apologizing
to themselves that you’d need to practice a rare patience. Choosing
to forgive oneself removes the distance between the ideal self and
the real self. The poem’s ideal self eats mostly quinoa, alternates
between cardio and free-weights three days a week. The poem’s real
self looks in the mirror and tries not to see you in the reflection. Who
is going to speak first.
* * * * *
I’m sorry I’ve never been to China. I said this to a man I met after a
lecture. He was a true hyperpolyglot. He said beautiful things to me
in French, then Arabic. English, Spanish, Mandarin. He drank beer
and I took little sips of each description of the places I’d honestly
made no sincere effort to visit. What I assume are the clouds above
the mountains in Canton. The smell of tea leaves roasting in a wok.
I think he took offense at how little I understood, despite the pains
he’d taken to learn to communicate. I took offense at the way he
spoke to himself through me, though I, too, love to sing a little
louder in the shower if I know that someone’s listening in the next
room. And we knew that we would never see each other again, and
it is meaningless to apologize to all the people you never finish
revealing yourself to.
* * * * *
I’m sorry for trying to write a poem about being Chinese. Well, half.
I’m sorry for trying to write a poem as a half-Chinese person, or at
the very least, I’m sorry for trying to write a half-poem about being
a person. It’s tricky to apologize for certain things. Even when I
write a respectable poem, I have the feeling there is nothing Chinese
about it. The familiar schoolyard taunt gets at the heart of things:
Chinese, Japanese, dirty knees. Muddled, lacking purity. And how
can you love such a thing? It was the same question that came up
when the poem was not a poem, but a spiral of prose: Am I related
to you? Should we hug? And would it matter to anyone that despite
being an utter snowflake in my dress and attitudes towards food and
approaches to poetry, my middle name illuminates my body like a
heat-stroked summer moon? I didn’t even know I was a Golden
Horse until my friend forced me to google “zodiac for June.” No
way to be Chinese and not in the same sentence—which is why I’m
grateful for the line. If there’s anything that understands the
dissonance, it is enjambment. A muddy pause, to crease, a thankful
split in I. Is it more pleasing, pluralized? Look at these.
* * * * *
Every time we’re near the water, I have an unbearable urge to
apologize to the squid I dissected in elementary school. What did it
teach me? Years after the desecration, I’m finally getting
uncomfortable always thinking of myself as lesson. Education is a
cruelty that never ends. She carried a cluster of eggs like small
grapes. I pinched her single ovary and turned a clump to brick-red
paste. I’m sorry I didn’t know, a squid has three kinds of heart. As I
approached her sack of ink, I lovingly nudged one and two aside,
left three in place. As I broke the pen of her spine and slid it around
the feathery prism of gill-meets-gland-below-mantle, a split-open
aspic readied its voice. Even today, there are summer camps for
these barbarics. And there was my prize: enough pigment for one or
two small letters.
***
Photograph of Cameron Quan Louie by Zoe Rose Lambert.
