Pimone Triplett

Pimone Triplett was born in 1965 in Oakland, California, and grew up in Maryland. She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her poems have appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, Poetry, Triquarterly, The Yale Review, and other journals. She is the author of Ruining the Picture (Northwestern University Press, 1998) and The Price of Light (Four Way Books, 2005). Triplett is currently an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington, and also teaches in the low-residency Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Story for the Mother Tongue

(Bangkok to Chang Mai)

Went to see the there that was, for me, full

latitudes, umpteen tracks of world away.

On a train, as it happened, sputtering-to-brake

half our time up the country’s question mark coast,

feeling beneath my feet a churn of steam and tin can,

hiss of dithyramb, bike spoke, whole gutter balls

in the aluminum beast. A full car hummed

with that one tongue not mine, but almost.

Since it was my own aunt, after all, who sang

out from the platform that morning not to be

kidnapped—lukpa—by anyone, nor taken

into the jungle for who knows what.

And so I knew a little of this music, falsetto

bounce and stutter up from the lungs of my mother

often enough. It came to nothing against

that din in the aisles, boxes and loose seat straps

jostling, the rise and fall pitch of two kids wrestling

their plastic bags, curry-slick. A boy beside me,

teen-aged, kept coughing the way

a kitchen timer ratchets backward.

He fed his dog mangoes clumped in sugar

and red pepper, the cage rapping for miles

on the window smear of rust and whiskey light.

Until finally something happened so that this couldn’t

be the one about the exotic anymore, but instead

I had to brace myself as the train lurched forward,

suddenly stopped. And how standing in line

for the bathroom the boy pushed himself into me

then, put his hand hard on my chest, high I don’t

know, booze on his breath maybe, I don’t know.

I couldn’t get free when he whispered into my ear

in English jesus christ and then slut, his lips moving

slow like words he’d just learned, like reciting after

the teacher in class.

Later alone in the WC at last,

gray waves of fluorescent power buzzing off, then on,

then off again, one fist-sized window, one way to look out,

I stared down, awful batter in the hole, a grid

near the feet grinding one blackness up against

another. Longer I stared the more I could feel

space shrinking all around, the crowd of us skimming

the river of tracks we rode on and no still point

in any of us by then, I thought, the water running

with no quiet under the blood and tissue, face and bone,

door jammed, and then just sounds bouncing in the small box—

the two syllables—kap khun. Which in Thai means

person, though I thought it was please when they

came from out of me at last, words I must have made

while pounding on the walls just then—kap khun—locked

in place, the seconds breaking open, mine

and endless and the train moving slowly on.

Next to Last Prayer

1.

Dear God, in shadows now and nothing but, come to think of it—

shape of a woman’s dark

laid down against rocks,

her hair split by wind, then let to be whole, and back again.

As somehow it used to matter that in St. Louis a few

thunderheads could crowd

an oval plot of sky

toddler side of the apartment pool just before the others,

women and children, barefoot or flipflopped, riddled the turnstyle.

My mouth was Mother’s mouth.

The daily materials, innocent,

still in motion: offerings of Doublemint and spear-,

bags of sponge yellow bunnies, Fresca, warm, a brass-lime

aftertaste that faded.

So okay God,

either the bits come back, or swim up in pictures,

the seconds grabbed. My father, more than often then,

camera-ready, saying: look

up, look out (snap).

I could hold myself right in the light so it finished

looking as though I’d held my breath. Something like swimming,

which he also taught,

mouthing: you hold your breath,

seconds before I went under for the push and flail,

that slick privacy. And so from now on I’d like to know

what’s to be made

of this life between

the mind’s swing on memory’s hinge (Father’s

splashing at the deep end) and this shadow, wavering,

falling down over

and over again

(dear Mother) against dirt, concrete, shade of the body

that won’t stay put—I know the point we never mentioned

was home, dark spot

on a kitchen curtain

where someone threw the bowl of hot soup, spot where the shouts

seemed to come from. I know our shapes graced in and out, faces

in a slow float

of underwater evenings,

shifting in a pool light’s cone through the frankly blue….

2.

But then you know already, don’t you God, the way the year

went on pulsing

toward a single day,

she and I suddenly in Chang Mai, Thailand, in her country,

because (they said later) she needed to get away. There in heat,

in dark, small houses,

her family’s portraits—

no one I knew—hung in arches over doorways. A pretty woman,

dead, a blue-eyed old man. Mother and I walked for hours under

the awning of an outdoor market.

Again, the things of this,

no, that, world, moving and absurdly “beautiful”: hills

of glass eyes and “whiteout,” bowls of plastic-wrapped pastry,

whole tables lined

with imitation pinecones

tied to miniature cacti, red seahorses in watery globes beside

a spinning pig topped by spiders under their golden goblets

that turned and turned,

until I turned

and she was gone. Then, rising up from the dark ground,

I saw him, half a man, really, his hand open, outstretched.

The eyes, blue,

the eyes, up at me.

A mouth, moving, and his syllables—Kor tow (you hold your breath).

Black in the palm lines and him up at me—Kor tow…

It was too hot. The human shadows

passed by, one then another, each

broken by a tangle of table legs below me, water in troughs, something

swimming at the edges of the aisles. The human, a pant of bodies

pressed to pay for linens,

silver, cameras, someone

(you hold your breath, snap) above me then reaching for a picture

of a woman naked, and then somewhere else, a voice

floating out

from under, but mine,

saying I wasn’t him, I was let to be whole,

saying don’t stare and aren’t you ashamed of yourself….

Until suddenly

she was back,

of course, and the haggling and our own relieved cries

came through. Later, she told me how his words were ones

of asking, a way

of saying please.

That night, when she must have held her body to me

(snap), it was one of the blanks, god, like mine by then, as we stood,

stilled, caught in the shadow’s

fix-in-place (snap), frozen

with the light behind us—our darks divided, falling to the floor.

Portraits at the Epicenter

1

Here’s the one where the sun

is thin as through fish bones,

late day in the picture, a girl standing

in the kitchen, hearing: fix

your hair, let’s hear your whistle, what

are the dolls’ names, say,

“potatoes.”

She’s young, at home,

wearing the sweater threaded with the shapes

of fifty states,

looking straight into

the camera’s flash of light.

Behind, a slackness in the curtain,

no, dark spot on the curtain where

they say one parent took aim at the other,

spot they made

larger than her body.

The camera light flashing now

back then, a present she’d been offered,

and snap, the future, everyone looking back

into the distance, the framed picture that was theirs,

hers now.

A bus carrying girls on the one side,

boys on the other.

An air raid siren sounding,

the beginners lining up for

a game of miss mary mac,

chalk on a thumbnail

lit by a match,

followed by the pledges of allegiance.

2.

Dark enough so that those shapes blackening

and seeming underneath

the surface must have been

the ducks not flying on the opposite bank

at the picnic that day, appearing flat, bloodless,

but moving, pagelike, no longer,

as we’d once thought,

weighted with our kind of living.

Flash, the day was done, we left the place.

Or then again maybe

nothing

like this happened, maybe

there was no place, only the distance

asking something of us.

I know there was an old man I loved,

Mother’s father, his battle stories

coming in like a voice-over

from outside the frame, whispering

Guernica, London,

Hiroshima…“They wanted,”

he said, “one light to marry

all the others.”

Here’s the one where he spills water

from a wooden bucket, swinging the mirror

round his neck again, to remember

the hour his air caught fire. Stop.

He spread an arm over the family plot,

as if the land could be taken like a bride.

Stop. What was the flash of light

like? Says he woke to walk away

from cast-off paneling, corrugated tin.

3.

Between there and here, I picture

the story of the mistress:

“It was murder,

Mother, taking your place.

At first they came because I looked like you,

later because I looked like them.

I had to practice

everything you said,

from lips berry-bright with opium,

to faking the one quiver that made them proud.

I held a match

so close to my eyes

half of them believed I blinked it out,

the fire lasting just long enough.

Some, burned like me, wanted

to show the flames of what remained still graceful.

Over the bed I’ve hung the painting

you left of yourself,

the mass light behind you

searing skin—arms—excoriated

to rags, wings.

How I must have loved you, Mother,

just before I was born,

before I had to be given

a name.”

4.

Once Grandfather wrote that he knew “This Is Your Life”

ranked high among viewers

in America. “They sent me an invitation

embossed with Hazel Bishop long-lasting

lipstick, nail enamel, cream.

The band played when I entered.

Applause came at unusual

parts. ‘The morning was perfectly

clear,’ I said (clap),

and suddenly the on-set air-raid siren

sounded (clap). A stranger entered.

Said he flew over

us, and sorry, my God…

and I said (but whispered), ‘a flash

of light, then I dropped…’

I remember the camera’s surge,

its collapsing one mirror onto another.

Say something, they said.

I said, ‘We came back out,

look at us.’

Say something, they said.

I said, ‘Re-member, this word you use

as if the body can be

repeated.’ (Cut!)

‘As the limbs of the dead

come back out of the distance.’ (Cut.)

‘Don’t look at me like I’m not here,’

I said, then,

‘Don’t look at me.’”