Flower Bouncer
for Dao Dao
This afternoon, an insect
crawled onto your classmate’s arm:
black with white spots, long thin legs.
Lai Lai screamed and kids ran over, helped her
brush it to the ground. Some kids said
it was a big mosquito, others said
it was a flea, they all thought it bit,
agreed to stomp it to death.
Little naturalist, all along studying
flowers and insects with me, only you knew
what you’ve known since age three:
this was a spotted wax cicada nymph,
common name Flower Bouncer,
which only drinks tree sap, doesn’t bite.
You explained this to the other kids
to stop their crazy stomping
but nobody believed you. A few
knew older wax cicada nymphs
are red and black but didn’t recognize
this younger nymph and said
you were talking nonsense. Everyone
ignored you. Gleeful stomping continued.
Beside them, you cried, shouting over and over
‘It’s really cute! It won’t bite!’
When the flower bouncer was smashed to bits
you lost control, stamped, shrieked,
yelled at the top of your lungs
‘It’s a life!’ Then
you started sobbing and threw yourself
at everyone, clawing, kicking, grimacing
and wouldn’t calm
even once the teacher pinned you
and held you down a long time.
When your teacher told me this story
her point was I should teach you
to control your emotions.
But what I heard were rage sounds
from your small bones
as you’re forced to grow up: daughter
this might be your first time learning
what it is to be crushed by a mob
and alone in knowledge, full
of futile passion, but how I wish
you could live the rest of your life
not learning it.
The Armadillo
I see the date on my computer and realize
last year I was in South America, on the beach
in Paraty, a town mined for gold in the 17th century
with a view of the sea and of Portugal’s decline.
When night fell, we returned to shore full of mindless clouds
and islands, wandering down every street we saw,
sighing whenever we passed something historic.
Red flashing lights shone on a strange place,
all the people going in and out were elegant men
and nonchalant women past their prime. We got happy
thinking this must be the pleasure district
but it was a center for literature and art
where crowds of intellectuals and their followers
from a hundred miles around had gathered
for solemn presentations on the history and genocide
of Indigenous Peoples along the Southeast Brazilian coast.
Portraits of Indigenous people hung from the walls.
On stage, lectures turned Indigenous people into
academic tongue twisters. In the gallery, fires were built
from odd pieces of wood to honor Indigenous Peoples.
We didn’t see a single actual Indigenous person
until we walked out and, on a street corner
a ways away, met several selling crafts in the dark.
They slept on the street and sold cheap wooden carvings,
baskets, decorative feathers. They didn’t hawk their wares.
If obliged to say a price in Portuguese, the numbers
sounded like cracked calluses, rough and painful.
We felt a warning in their eyes, a 500-year-old
defense line. From the other side of it
we bought a wooden armadillo. Well, armadillo.
Gentle armored animal with weak eyesight and soft teeth.
You find safety in the forest like their ancestors did.
Well, Paraty. I’ve just been mournfully informed
by elites: the Indigenous Peoples of this place
were powerful and organized, spoke fluent
Tupi-Guaraní languages and were all murdered.
The elites don’t want to mention their descendants.
Callus you won’t see, won’t hear on the night’s larynx.
The Shark Tooth Collector
for Zang Di
A man who collects shark teeth
bends forward, sticks out his middle-aged butt
and searches where the sand meets the ocean.
If he stood this way back home as a child
he’d look like he was planting rice seeds
in fertile East Asian soil. But believe me
he’s actually collecting shark teeth
in Sarasota County, Florida
on the western beach of a long thin island
called Manasota facing the Gulf of Mexico.
Like a man possessed, he searches
all afternoon, the blazing sun
tries to melt him into white light. But
with every tooth he finds he feels he gains
a shark’s strength. That shiny
black tooth exuding the indisputable
urgency of the bite is a particle of power
the sea saves, is accelerated bloodthirst
at rest in the sand, is the huge ruthless beauty
of the depths flipped by the tides, now
a kernel of beauty’s ruthlessness. He clutches
these still-sharp little things, these
fleshless sharks, imagining how
in the murky depths of middle age
he’ll sometimes face oncoming doom
flaunting thousands of shark teeth.
Little Children
When you were one month old
your wild sleep became a flock
of playful sheep and only my crappy singing
could herd them from their Martian pastures
back to the perpetual motion machine
of your small body. I became
your faithful sleep-shepherd.
Two or three times a day
I herd sleep, singing a song
called ‘Little Children’
little children with no worries,
look around, the sun is shining…
This song is from a German film
whose plot I’ve completely forgotten,
a West German film to be precise
called ‘Handsome Boy’. As an ugly boy
struggling with the word handsome
I memorized this song out of spite.
I never imagined an even uglier self
singing it thirty years later
to lure melatonin from your pineal gland
long after East and West Germany
had vanished off the map.
Day after day, I sing ‘Little Children’
herding sleep’s flock into a certain hour.
I feel I’m watching one handsome boy
after another hold your future hand
as you travel the world together. By then
old ugly me might sing ‘Little Children’
to shepherd my own shaky sleep.
Finally, one day after you turn one, you tire
of all the boys and their handsomeness
and just want to listen to my ugly voice
telling a random story. I become your faithful
sentence-and-onomatopoeia-wielding
sleep shepherd. But I miss them
a little, those boys who danced
with your melatonin, that boy
crushed by the word handsome
in a small town 1980s movie theatre.
Image © Marc Lambrechts
