Let’s Talk for a Moment
about the persistence of ice, my father, in Michigan,
trying to manipulate frozen water for months
in his driveway. I can picture him now in his snowsuit,
thick gloves and boots: plowing, shoveling, scraping.
Different types of ice occur depending on speed,
location: drift which floats on the ocean, anchor
at bottom of the sea, freezing rain that icifies midfall,
icicles that weep down store awnings, sharpened
into skewers. Sometimes I dream about the rime
I scraped for years off my windshield, that layer
of solid fog, a pest in the Michigan morning,
when I was running late for Russian class, repeating
the rhyming Pushkin lines I needed to learn that day:
Мороз и солнце; день чудесный! Еще ты дремлешь,
друг Прелестный! I’d say, over and over. And there
were other times when I was injured by ice,
slipping as a child and bursting into tears.
Crying is a sort of melting. We’re all hard ice before
a sudden pain or fear splashes its sun against our
coolness. I remember when my great-grandmother was
on her deathbed, I saw my father cry for the first time,
an avalanche of snow tumbling forward. He rested
his forehead against his inner elbow, leaning against
the bed where she lay. Moments later, he returned
to his habitual stillness. After a few days, I told him
that I’d seen him crying, and he denied it, not wanting
to talk about the warm waters swelling underneath,
not wanting me to know of them. Ice is a quiet,
fragile strength. Lately, I too am held together
by a cold so feeble I can break apart any minute.
But let’s not talk about me. Let’s talk again about snow
and ice, my father in his driveway, an immigrant
to America, laboring over American ice, spooning it up,
like cold rice for breakfast, into a pile in his corner
of the suburbs; let’s talk about my father, who says
he’s not afraid of springtime, hate crimes
against Asians, who tells me he always feels safe
in his city, where he can stay inside his home,
barricaded by snow, avoid other people; my father,
who asks for a door camera for Christmas, who watches
Forensic Files, learns all the different ways one can
get lost or lose someone; let’s talk about the emails
my father sends to my brother and me, a list of his life
insurance, he says It’s time to think about eternity.
When I think of eternity, I always think of ice, the glaciers
that persist for centuries, seracs and crevasses.
It is April, and my mother sends me a picture of their
deck covered in snow. I imagine my father sliding
on his boots, drifting quietly outside to see his wintery
spring, his ungloved hands anchored in his pockets,
his eyes raised to heaven, waiting for more.
The Walnut House
We wanted our own place. So, we lived on Walnut Street and took theater classes at the community college. Sam was a good actor, could bring life to Shakespeare, make his meanings clear. We drank walnut wine on Walnut Street
and invited people over. The house was owned by Homer, but this is no epic. This is a flat, nonnarrative, Midwestern conversation, the likes of which we had every day that year, the long winding talks a person could enter with little effort, a path in a field
with no hill or knotty roots. But I could make this an epic. I could build into it a journey plot, if necessary. It was 2007. We were nineteen and twenty, and we ruined Homer’s house with our boredom.
Homer never came by to pick up rent. Why was that? He was seventy and did push-ups on our back porch. He’d renovated the house before we moved in. He’d done all that work. And we drank too much and flushed tampons
down the toilet, our friends vomiting on the kitchen tile. By 2008, the walls in the Walnut house were stained and crumbling like rotting teeth. What is the opposite of an epic? A lyric? Lyric poetry is not the opposite, but just another type, another option.
Some would say we could’ve chosen another type of coming-of-age story. We didn’t need the underaged lotus-eaters drinking wine on our porch, breaking the staircase banister. Didn’t need the afternoons spent nursing the headache, bike stolen, the smell
of smoke and Michigan leaves, the color of cheddar cheese, plummeting down our driveway. Perhaps Sam and I could’ve moved to Chicago. We could’ve auditioned for plays at the Steppenwolf. Sam was truly a good actor, could cry
on command. But perhaps it could’ve been worse on Walnut Street. We could’ve died from raw chicken on the counter, someone could’ve broken a hip from all the dancing, someone could’ve drunk from the wrong cup, and yet, we made it out alive.