I hope you do not have to catch your breath, watching me waltzing across a tightrope as if there were no chance of my falling into a pool of facts echoing facts.
I accuse myself of unseemly frivolity, double focus and counterpoint.
Age 3, I lived near Liberty Avenue, across the street from a Chinese laundry.
I noticed it was the first store to open. the last to close at night, a river of steam poured out of a glass door transom Chinese writing on closed glass windows.
Someone told me if I put pink paper under the laundry’s door, it meant someone died. They would close the store, run home.
I crossed the busy street alone, I did that.
They continued their fearless laundry work, my criminal act, an angel of death memory.
My father believed in the Chinese proverb, “Beat your son once every day, if you do not know a reason why, he does.”
In winter, laundry steam melted snow and ice, caressed cold skin under an overcoat.
In a summer heat wave, Chinese steam blistered the screaming cement sidewalks.
Age 7, my teacher, Miss Murphy, told the class, “You wouldn’t want a Chinaman to move next door.”
“Yes I would.” She accused me of classroom treason, “Go to the corner, face the wall for 10 minutes.”
Lunar years later, some Skull and Bone heroes wanted to kick me out of Yale Grad School for supporting Mao, not Chiang Kai-shek, who was advised by Nazi German generals.
Since I was seven, I painted poems, as I do, about ancestors, nature, and gods.
The Chinese melted my heart of U.S. Steel into a wildflower. I loved roses and briars, daisies, dandelions, violets, the silk route.
In a lottery of butterflies I loved and won the right to come out of my chrysalis.
I was knocked over by Waley’s translations.
Pounds ideograms in The Pisan Cantos, are my Saint Peter upside down mistakes, when I worked for sinner and saint taller than I was, James Laughlin the third.
I never, never loved a lady named Rose.
Lunar years passed. Barnstone got me invited to teach English Lit in Beijing for a while.
I held Chinese friends close, then closer.
I breezed through Shinto, the Japanese mind, beautiful temples, sacred and evil places.
I taught the King’s English in Kyoto, wrote on Japan two Raw Fish Poems.
Nanking, Guadalcanal, Hiroshima, Fukushima, are not a daisy chain.
I was shaken by Japanese erotic art that also had the purpose of selling beautiful manufactured robes.
Next, Poems Seasoned with Chinese Experience, distantly lighted by Chinese poetry.
I remember when President Kennedy was shot Richard Wilbur broke down a church door so he could pray at a Christian altar.
Look, the whole damned book and last look is Not Yet.
It’s November 2020 now; still to come, perhaps nothing. I’ll write drop dead or last messages till April 2021. I will dance gravely.
Was it a floating log or a frog that taught me if I tried to drown this book, it swims away?
Idle reader, I hope something in this book will help you swim across a desert, before I say “one, two, three − go, turn the page.”
I might name this book Impossibilities.
I tell you, mongooses saw me swimming across the Sahara, the Gobi, the Painted Desert, the Negev, the Lemnos, impossible sands.
Off you go to Tudela, the Ebro valley, meet the 12th century traveler Benjamin of Tudela, celebrate the immaculate conception.
I would take it as a compliment if you say Not Yet is a deadly sin that you fell asleep reading and woke up, God in bed with you in the morning.