Excerpts

The Clock The Clock--died on June 24, 2009 and it was untimely.  How many times my father has failed the clock test.  Once I heard a scientist with Alzheimer's on the radio, trying to figure out why he could no longer draw a clock.  It had to do with the superposition of three types.  The hours represented by 1--12, the minutes where a 1 no longer represents 1 but 5, and a 2 now represents 10, then the second hand that measures 1 to 60.  I sat at the stoplight and thought of the clock, its perfect circle and its superpositions, all the layers of complication on a plane of thought, yet the healthy read the clock in one single instant without a second thought.  I think about my father and his lack of first thoughts, how every thought is a second or third or fourth thought, unable to locate the first most important thought.  I wonder about the man on the radio and how far his brain has degenerated since.  Marvel at how far our brains allow language to wander without looking back but knowing where the pier is.  If you unfold an origami swan, and flatten the paper, is the paper sad because it has seen the shape of the swan or does it aspire towards flatness, a life without creases?  My father is the paper.  He remembers the swan but can't name it.  He no longer knows the paper swan represents an animal swan.  His brain is the water the animal swan once swam in, holds everything, but when thawed, all the fish disappear.  Most of the words we say have something to do with fish.  And when they're gone, they're gone. * from V ictoria Chang's Essay on "Clocks" In retrospect, perhaps my initial resistance to writing about my mother's death was a resistance to the elegy because I felt that everyone had already done it better than I ever could, and elegies didn't feel quite right for my own grieving process or grieving experience. My obits more aptly capture the fragmented nature of my own grief. They also seem more anti-sentimental, anti-celebratory, and perhaps rooted more in philosophy than praise, song, or lament. In this way, my obits feel culturally different to me--they feel like more of a Chinese American experience of grieving and grief. The poet Matthew Zapruder once said to me that my obit poems "show your thinking" and I think that best encapsulates the process of writing these poems. The thinking mind is rarely linear--it branches, then branches off of the branch, and then off of that branch, then sometimes like a little bee, thinking jumps from branch to branch, flower to flower, tree to tree, and suddenly, the writer is like a drunk bee, buzzing around on a warm spring day, unsure of where she is or where she started, but feeling full, but unlike a bee, poems (at least mine) don't need to end up at the hive or where they began. Excerpted from Personal Best: Makers on Their Poems That Matter Most All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.