The Year of Blue Water 9780300244830

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Volume 113 of the Yale Series of Younger Poets

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The Year of Blue Water

Yanyi Foreword by Carl Phillips

Published with assistance from a grant to honor James Merrill. Copyright © 2019 by Yanyi. Foreword copyright © 2019 by Carl Phillips. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-­mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Designed by Mary Valencia. Set in Walbaum MT type by Tseng Information Systems, Durham, North Carolina. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2018951465 ISBN 978-­0-­300-­24265-­2 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­300-­24264-­5 (paperback : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Literature needs lots of people. It’s enough to honor the project. —Susan Sontag, interviewed by Leslie Garis

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FOREWORD

It seems exactly right that the epigraph to Yanyi’s The Year of Blue Water should include “Literature needs lots of people,” a sentence from Susan Sontag that perhaps speaks to the need for readers, but in the context of these poems seems more to suggest that community is in some way a requirement for the making of literature—indeed, of any art. Pretty much from the start of this collection, and steadily throughout it, we encounter two parallel communities, the speaker’s living friends (Doreen, LiZhen, Michelle, Julie, Rebecca, to name a few), and a wide range of makers, living and dead, of art (including Agnes Martin, Frank O’Hara, Robin Coste Lewis, Robert Hass). On one hand, these communities serve the usual purpose of providing companionship in aloneness. But another purpose of community is to serve as testing ground against which to pitch the self and within which to contextualize and better understand the self. This second purpose turns out to be the crucial one for the speaker (whom I’ll refer to as Yanyi, since he names himself as the speaker). For one of the larger themes of The Year of Blue Water is a sort of double crisis of self: an inability / unwillingness to know the self, coupled with an understanding of the self as something better off left invisible—in the eyes

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of the world generally, and so powerfully, that we begin to believe what the world says about us. Understandably, the impulse is at best to hide: The thing about hiding one thing about yourself for ten years is that it warps your perception of the real you. What you must protect against all odds becomes your defect, your truth, your failure, your success. It becomes the most authentic thing you have because you have no means of going further, of wanting more. There were consequences for knowing myself. I didn’t want to want more. —“For three years” And at worst, the impulse is toward suicide: When I am alone in the worst way, I am trapped with myself. Something in me doesn’t want me to live. No—­ something in me doesn’t want me to continue. It must not be life, what I’ve been doing. It can’t be life, to not want to live. —“Agnes Martin tells me” What exactly has made the self seem so unacceptable, so unbearable? One of the most striking aspects of Yanyi’s book is how nonchalantly—in passing, as it were—we learn that Yanyi is trans. Six poems in, “Before tarot” opens with Before tarot, I tell Diana that the worst thing about being trans isn’t hating my body: it’s not having many feelings about it at all.

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Later, there will be two other glancing references: the parenthetical “I was a girl at the time” (“At lunch”) and “When I was a woman” (“The male dancers”). Which is to say, this could easily have been a confessional book, in the usual literary sense of confession, but Yanyi offers us something more invitational and experiential, less the performance of confession than the invitation into experience that turns out to be more shared than not. The Year of Blue Water becomes the enactment of how it feels to wrestle with, know, and insist on one’s true self, whatever true might mean beside the self’s necessarily ongoing evolution. Being trans happens to be the context (one context, at least) within and around which this quest for self occurs—but the quest itself is the point. It’s a quest whose momentum begins with sheer acceptance. Here is “There are places” in its entirety: There are places I can’t go, like outside my body. Understanding the fact of this seems a catalyst both for reckoning with this urge (implied, at least) to go outside the body and, accordingly, for interrogating the body itself. Yanyi wisely refuses to define what it means to be trans (presumably this is different for each person), but he speaks personally of a sense of duality, which makes sense: there’s the self we know (or intuit) ourselves to be, and there’s the self that society ascribes to us and which, for a time, we often feel no choice but to inhabit, or try to: In a dual body, when one of you is willing to harm their body, your body, the shared body, you sometimes have to shrink to the size of a pea in order to evade pain. You evade by not existing, or existing only enough to respond, survive, ix

escape. Existing to be pleasurable enough, to be ok enough to keep around. —“Real anger” Notice, though, that this duality needn’t be confined to sexual identity or gender. I mentioned earlier that this is but one context for the poems here. Another is mental illness—a subject which is also rather glanced at than showcased, but is very much part of these poems, not just in the form of suicidal tendency, but more often as anxiety, the kind that can paralyze: Anxiety lives in my upper throat and crying lives in my lower throat. . . . Anxiety pulls with a sense of helplessness, of no release. —“Anxiety lives” So I see another duality, between the healthy, rational self and the other irrational one, the one of sometime despair. And there’s yet a third duality that is connected to a third context for Yanyi’s quest, namely, family—and specifically, being born to a family for whom both queerness and mental illness simply shouldn’t exist. To be raised thus is to understand the duality of who one is versus who one’s family insists one will be. Again, the references to family are few: My parents are invested in inheritance as power. —“My parents are invested” and

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She tells me she feels guilty for giving birth to me. What I am—I’ve gone further than gambling, drug addiction, death—I’ve killed the image of her daughter. —“She tells me” and She had hit me many other times. Other times, she would pinch me hard but never enough that it bruised. When she kissed me it was just as hard and just as long. When did I become repulsive? Repulsion is a feeling that you can direct to your own body. But someone has to teach you first. —“She had hit me” But together they say a great deal, indeed. Queerness, familial expectations, mental health issues—so much for what this writer, then, is up against. Again, though, the appeal of this book lies in how it refuses a predictable engagement with trauma and the catalysts behind it, and instead works as the living musculature of what I suppose could be called recovery, but I prefer stabilization, for its suggestion of recovery-­for-­now, of the ongoing work of maintaining balance, as opposed to defeating imbalance. In the course of the book, Yanyi turns occasionally to therapy, a few times to tarot. But from the start it’s clear that writing itself will be the rescuing force: I’m working on being alone today. . . . It comforts me to write letters: they remind me that there is someone listening on the other end. Likewise, I have received writing that felt

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made for me. People who are dead want to talk to me. I’m writing; I invite you to my life. —“I’m working on being alone” Note here how writing gets attached to communion with others—letters, in this case, but each poem can be seen this way as well. To read the writing of others is to be spoken to, that is, to be acknowledged as existing, is to be invited to exist; likewise, to write is to extend invitation, to believe in the presence of others who will accept the invitation. Yet another way to see The Year of Blue Water is as an extended meditation on writing itself. One of the lessons of that meditation is that a life of writing—actively writing for oneself as well as reading the writing of others—is a life of intentional love and generosity. This seems as good a place as any to address the form of these poems. Most prose poems that I encounter 1) seem a default, the easier alternative to having to negotiate the work of lineation and of producing surprising language; and/or 2) seem programmatic in appearance but turn out finally to be without program, which is to say the form, rather than essential, comes across as arbitrary, random. The strangest sensation for me, in reading The Year of Blue Water, occurred at the very beginning. The first poem, “Dream Diary,” is a poem in the conventional sense, lineated, shot through with imagery, stitched together by the various musics of anaphora-­ as-­refrain, assonance, parallelism, and there’s the in medias res quality that seems to go hand in hand with the contemporary lyric. To pass from that poem into the prose poem that follows it was a bit like moving from warm to unexpectedly cold, bracing water. And it seemed purposeful. It’s as if dream were consigned to lyric—container for unreality—and the xii

real world, the one harder to face, at times, required prose, but this is not to be confused with flatness of language. Yanyi opts instead for restraint and precision, which doesn’t have to mean spareness always, but here spareness is favored. ­Yanyi’s sentences recall those of Hemingway; deceptively simple, effortless-­seeming, at first, but with a cumulative resonance that proves each sentence has been thought about long and carefully. Another purpose for the prose poem here is to give a diaristic sense to the book overall (indeed, the combination of quest and as-if-daily report brought to mind Matsuo Basho-­’s Narrow Road to the Deep North), even as a purpose for the simple sentences is to sustain a content of dailiness and of routine—someone phones, someone is cooking; meanwhile that content gets counterbalanced by the interiority of self-­ reflection (another duality, the external rounds of our daily lives, versus our myriad thoughts across any given day). It’s worth noting, as well, that Yanyi at one point refers to sentences and people (community again) as being related: There are so many people threaded and connected through the linear progress of sentences. It reads like time, powered by adjacency . . . —“I don’t count the references” If this is a way to understand people, in terms of sentence progression, it seems reasonable to see sentences as a community of parts working like a group of individual people toward a common goal. In which case, each sentence can be seen as exemplary of communal action. To return to an earlier thought about writing as a rescuing force, here is Yanyi on form: xiii

Form gives space for something to exist. You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it. Places you don’t know appear. Poems are a way to ask for what exists, to invite what wants to be visible. —“Form gives space” We have seen the urge to be invisible; here, form becomes a way to counter that urge. More exactly, the poem invites the self to refuse, or at least resist, invisibility by offering the self a safe space for visibility. Have we come close to the idea, then, of writing as therapy? Why not, if by therapy is meant a sustained and mindful, ever forward-­moving engagement with the self and its surroundings? If this is therapy, it’s also epistemology and a Socratic quest to know the self through interrogation. It’s also a form of resistance, as Yanyi himself points out: I have spent a lot of time doing instead of thinking about what I will do. Writing this is a site of resistance. —“I have spent” The implication is that it’s easier to act, harder to think ahead of one’s actions. Yanyi argues for thought, and for the silence that attends it: Silence is a means of consideration. It hangs on the wall hook, suspended against meaning, against utility. Silence is the consideration of meaning, the process of meaning, the place where meaning is born. —“Robin Coste Lewis talks”

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If the end result is stability—by the end, at least, of The Year of Blue Water—Yanyi is in no way naïve about it. “When I loved someone I finally understood that I was worthy of love,” he says at one point, and “Love exists in me like a counterbalance” (“When I loved someone”). But elsewhere he also says “I thought love was a trapdoor out of loneliness. Hint: it super isn’t” (“I thought love was a trapdoor”). And yet there’s something triumphant about this book and where it takes us. I think it has less to do with an arrival at something closer to one’s true, best-­for-­now self than with the honesty and clarity of thought about that arrival; as if instead of embracing the self in each of us, we’d be better off respecting that self. Yanyi reminds us that, for all of the questing for stability, the fact that the self is ever changing includes an instability that deserves its own respect. To get there is nothing short of revolution: out of fear, into the work of living—of loving, too. I thought, at times, while reading these poems, of Adrienne Rich’s sequence Twenty-­One Love Poems—a sequence that also addresses how to navigate the combination of loving, living, and writing. Yanyi’s take on this, though, is luminously, and realistically, his own: You tell me that the old you is dead. I am also not who I used to be. The revolution is emotional. I found a reason to not fear death. I found more reasons to live, reasons to change what is living inside me and around me. The revolution is that I care about my own safety, that I believe my life is valuable and worth pursuing. As in, I am worth the work of transformations. As in, I do not fear how I will emerge from myself, or how many times. —“You tell me”

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Not that the struggle gets better, but that it can. Not that there won’t be transformations that we ourselves can’t guess at—but why be afraid? There’s a strange hope to that way of thinking, a hope born of courage and generosity, out of which Yanyi has made a book of wondrous changes, art, a life. Carl Phillips

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T H E Y E A R O F B L U E WAT E R

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Dream Diary You’re awake, then you are standing. Then the last thing that you dreamed will unfold its field of memory. What you touch will come to life: a whole room sprung in the backwards words of people untalking to you. Walking reverse with such confidence until you reach another room. There stands this person who is also a talisman. In the dream, it doesn’t matter when they loved you. In the dream, when you talk, the butterflies are orange and then blue, and together you lead the rabble to the square where you touch this person and then leave them. And on cue a flock of pigeons will soon want nothing but to return to you. And on cue the cedars become green and then stone, this person unmaking love from you and placing the pieces elsewhere, again, on earth. Until before that. Until the somewhere else before you agreed to move. Then you are language, too. Backwards words unstuck to the dream as the dream began to happen. And the ghosts inside the many rooms rustle nude inside the blue water. And the ghosts inside the many rooms illuminate the many walls.

1

I’m working on being alone today. It’s the new year. I start with drunk dreams and then texts to Diana about carrying our homes with us. I think about who I want to write letters to: Joe, Katherine, Mary. It comforts me to write letters: they remind me that there is someone listening on the other end. Likewise, I have received writing that felt made for me. People who are dead want to talk to me. I’m writing; I invite you to my life.

2

Michelle says I have three I’s: a diary I, a lyric I, and an I masquerading as a you. Michelle says the diary I is not the strongest I, the politics of which distracts me for weeks until I come to realize that I want to know who I’ve been talking to. In all instances, I am talking to myself. At least, I mean to.

3

Frank O’Hara’s “Morning” is the first poem I consciously memorized. I am writing it in Wei-­Ming’s letter and I am rereading it this morning very slowly. Seeing the text, I realize that I have memorized some parts incorrectly. At first, I was not reading it; I was reciting it from that place where rhythms and bodies begin to stay with each other. Reciting quickly because I needed to catch the rhythm as it happened to me, so that I would not lose the music of the poem and therefore the poem. Right now, losing the poem as it exists may not be the worst thing. If I really knew it, I could do it at any speed.

4

I tell my therapist that my anxiety made solitude unbearable, and that I was easing back into being alone by writing letters, mailing things. Over the course of one night, the objects in my apartment came alive. They are of or for the people I am writing to. Pictures I took of them; poems that are inspired by their interests. With joy. When I am writing, I am never alone, I say to someone, who says that that is probably right, that is what we need right now. Agnes Martin says to me that I am the source of my own response. The artist is not responsible for the onlooker. It can’t be helped that I have no control of my family. They may leave me; I accept that.

5

Before tarot, I tell Diana that the worst thing about being trans isn’t hating my body: it’s not having many feelings about it at all. You can’t feel what you’ve never been interested in. I have never felt well in my body. It’s not what I’ve hated. It’s what I haven’t known to miss at all.

6

When I’m potting the plants, I think about this little life in my apartment. I have not been home to help it grow. When the sun is treading lightly over winter months, it is so nice to talk to Robin over the phone. It is so nice to nail my poster back up, to put new lights along the wall. There are more ways I can be here. There are things I have not done.

7

Definitions are not static. They are where we begin. For what? By whom? Beginning is not an origin. It is the arbitrary place from which we start one life, when that becomes this.

8

Kate has an idea to start a podcast series where she interviews other Kates. In high school, a girl who sent me a heart-­shaped necklace also sent me a typewritten note in a copy of An Abundance of Katherines. I try not to count the number of Kates, Katherines, Caitlins in my life for reasons that overlap with why Kate is starting her podcast. This is a note to ask Kate why she is starting her podcast. No one has my name or knows how to pronounce it. I believed this until the first week of college, when I was telling someone exactly this on Low steps and a man started calling for me because I had won a raffle. Another Yanyi appeared several feet above me and I had to change how I saw myself distinctly. I was never unique; I was just made to feel that way.

9

We didn’t have cable. We had a satellite dish that absorbed wavelengths. Despite being labeled aliens, this is the closest we would get to extraterrestrial. The plane rides count, too, thirteen hours at a time, which is also the time difference to China. All we did as aliens, we did because at some point, it is easier to be lonely than to continue working. Opportunity did not do work for us. To be a foreigner was to be a guest in all houses, to not know manners, to not have a past. Every day was a day when we started over. Every day we were so rootless, we had to make the same friends over and over again.

10

I asked for Cheerios a week after my fifth birthday, which was also my last birthday party. I don’t remember what we usually had for breakfast, but it was not that. I wanted Cheerios because it was the most delicious snack I had ever had and I never asked for things from the store. They were expensive; they weren’t off-­brands. We didn’t have bags, so I used cellophane and tape to meticulously wrap a handful of Cheerios into a bag-­like structure. Then I walked across the hall to June’s apartment. June was one of my first best friends, or at least that was what I told myself. I’m not sure if she remembers who I am but I remember being embarrassed more than once at her house. I knocked on June’s door and held the bag of Cheerios in front of my face and said thank you for coming to my party. I don’t remember what she said. When I went home, my face was hot with embarrassment. Had she been confused? Did it dawn on me as I saw her face, whatever it had been, that it was just weird to give people cereal as party favors? Cereal that I only knew about because once, I had had it at June’s house. Ah, so that’s what had happened. I didn’t know how to have a party. I didn’t know what I could have as party favors, and that it was not okay to lick the sugar off the plate when I was finished with my donut. Thinking back, perhaps I don’t have birthday parties because of the way I was made to feel poor, that I had nothing to give.

11

Doreen and LiZhen are generous, they want to know about me. We spend most of the afternoon talking about the things I’ve been thinking and the life that I live. In fact, I like it. It seems so selfish, to want to be known!

12

We go through my baby photos. In this photo, I am eating, and Doreen says that my house looks like her house, that she, too, took many photos like this: small hands each holding a chopstick, the rice bowl in between.

13

What I also mean to say is that I recognize the focus. The impulse to know someone else before you reveal yourself. The impulse to know someone else because you have never been asked to reveal yourself. The impulse to know someone else because otherwise, you do not know yourself. The impulse to know someone else because you are self-­conscious of your whole self, the one that fills up too many rooms, so much space. The impulse to hide how much space you need. The impulse to hide what you need.

14

“The other kids made fun of our house,” Doreen says of her American friends. I screw my face with incredulity, but I completely understand.

15

Kate calls it a camaraderie; a kinship with the other Kates. Specifically, no derivatives, but the moment when you poke up your head at the same sound, the knowledge that a name is what you’re given and completely outside of who you are. Kate wants to discover the other Kates. She wants to discover who they each are.

16

Here’s what it’s like if it’s hard to put yourself first: you genuinely feel happiness when someone else’s needs are fulfilled. At least, this is what you know as happiness: the relief of not being seen, of having someone preoccupied with themselves. Well, that’s not exactly right. There is relief in seeing another person being happy. Being happy makes it possible for that other person to love someone. In my case, I want another person to be able to love me.

17

There are places I can’t go, like outside my body.

18

Agnes Martin tells me that I need not fear being alone. To be alone is to face not one fear but multiple fears, and to know them enough to differentiate them. When I am alone in the worst way, I am trapped with myself. Something in me doesn’t want me to live. No—something in me doesn’t want me to continue. It must not be life, what I’ve been doing. It can’t be life, to not want to live.

19

Pomegranates In my dreams, my parents almost always die, or I do. I cannot speak to them clearly. This time my mother and father are in bed, having been shot in their sleep. They are dying, but they can talk to me. And for some reason this is very comforting. In the dream, I know that I love my parents; that I want to see them alive. In the dream, I’m still their kid. I’m not a ghost. I’m grieving. And for some reason, you show up right at this time, telling me not to be afraid of death. That we are all going to die. That we are going to eat from the fruit of our lives together. You with the fruit that you love and that you share with me. I guess the ways I belong to someone else are the ways that they appear to me. How else if not from the fruit of our lives together. And sometimes apart. Or often apart.

20

Maureen McLane tells Rebecca that in a moment of communal emergency, it is easy to lose our selves. I repeat this to at least three more people within three days. This is personal: now I am writing in a panic. I need it to keep myself. I return, sitting in the audience, listening to conversation like a sermon. How do we keep each other? I return, sitting in another classroom, listening to Saskia hum Bob Dylan before he won a Nobel Prize, right beneath the thumbprint of sun coming through the blinds. The blinds in the classroom that are on hardwood floors like the ones I grew up with, stretching behind the front door, reading Róz˙ewicz for the first time. How do we keep each other? Making notes of this all.

21

For a long time, I was attached to she/her as my pronouns, even when I was nonbinary. They didn’t seem as sharp as I wanted it to be. And I like precision. Diana tells me that to be trans or nonbinary is not to be a woman but to be of women. That seems a more useful gesture. I never want to disappear unequivocally into masculinity. Womanhood is the country I come from, a home I reach back for to reproduce, recreate, replenish.

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After a month, we call each other on the phone. I am sitting on my couch and already tired and you tell me about Greece and Carolyn Forché. That is where you were taught to keep a notebook and to write in it every day. I agree that this is a good idea. You recommend that I start one. I agree but it takes me another six months to try.

25

It was graduation, and I had already said goodbye to so many people. Everyone else had plans and family to attend to, so we were alone. It was supposed to be a proud moment, but my thing, my life, had ruined it. At the time, I owned a small collection of oxfords, undoubtedly masculine. Before she came, I hid them in a bag that I didn’t move to my new apartment because I knew she would find them there. For two days, I wore shoes with no arch support. On the third day, I wore my brown oxfords to be comfortable. No one looks at anyone’s shoes. For the rest of the day, we were at the museum and all she could talk about was my shoes. At the foldable table in my new apartment, she asked me if I was gay, which I had told her ten years ago but she didn’t believe me. She asked me if I was gay, and I didn’t say anything, but I cried. She threw away the shoes and then we had dinner. When I did the dishes, I had to empty the rice onto my shoes and I never saw them again.

26

Real anger is suffused with desperation. It doesn’t go away. It murmurs beneath the crust of the ground, or a person who serves as the ground you stand on. I’m not saying it’s a good idea for another person to be that for you. I’m just saying it’s happened to me and it could have happened to you: you were raised to be connected to someone else on this earth. In a dual body, there’s no room for both of you. In a dual body, when one of you is willing to harm their body, your body, the shared body, you sometimes have to shrink to the size of a pea in order to evade pain. You evade by not existing, or existing only enough to respond, survive, escape. Existing to be pleasurable enough, to be okay enough to keep around.

27

At lunch, I pretended that my body didn’t want food. It wanted fries or peanut M&Ms; they were a dollar instead of two, the price of high school lunch. I saved money this way. I wasn’t sure what I was saving my body for. This was yet another thing it absorbed. So many other girls did this every day (I was a girl at the time). We watched each other but never talked about it.

28

Robin Coste Lewis describes beauty as a field of power. The search for land, for possession, for domination, is all in service of a search for pleasure.

29

She had hit me many other times. Other times, she would pinch me hard but never enough that it bruised. When she kissed me it was just as hard and just as long. When did I become repulsive? Repulsion is a feeling that you can direct to your own body. But someone has to teach you first.

30

My therapist tells me that I need to work on holding onto myself. This is my first therapist. I don’t know what she means. I thought that having myself was not supposed to take any effort.

31

I have spent a lot of time doing instead of thinking about what I will do. Writing this is a site of resistance. More and more, I see hunger as the enemy of consciousness, the present as an enemy of the past. If we can’t survive, we can’t think. Hunger is where we are, what we are doing, instead of something else.

32

Suzanne moved to Seattle probably a year ago at this point, and she has come back to tell me that in Seattle, time moves slower. In the Lower East Side, chopping up vegetables would take so much time. Now it feels like it takes nothing. Suzanne tells me about a French cookbook which sounds like it reads like a memoir. In the cookbook, the author says the way to start cooking is to start boiling water. Which is the easiest thing. Which is the thing into which a chicken goes, vegetables, whatever you want at hand. From the end of that meal you make the next meal. Think of the leftovers, what you have around the house. From there the food becomes endless.

33

I don’t count the references, but Maggie Nelson includes many of them. They sit in the margins like names in a phone book, and she talks about her life. There are so many people threaded and connected through the linear progress of sentences. It reads like time, powered by adjacency, auras burned with other auras, each making the other another center.

34

My research is a combination of advice columns, comprehensive sex-­ed websites for teens, and horoscopes. There is an entire stream of emotional knowledge relegated to the darker depths of the Internet. I read these articles for entire mornings. I reread the definition of love: compassion, respect, accountability. Strategies for your sexual self. What to know about an Aries. You say that my sister was raised by the feminist Internet. We would have been too, if the feminist Internet had existed to us when we were younger. It was probably already there, just like the advice columns and the steady articles dispelling our assumptions that romantic love is this misshapen catch-­all for all the wrongs of one’s life. The only other time I have looked for answers this hard—anywhere, through any place—I was taking quiz after quiz, personality test after personality test, trying to reach the person I wanted to be.

35

I am home after Lucia di Lammermoor at the Heartbeat Opera. Julie and I raced through Times Square and I stepped on her shoe. I return to the time at dinner when I called her scattered. I now see how that was hurtful. Julie going all around the world before she goes to grad school and seeming happy, at least from what I could tell from the rush of talk of a few avenues and blocks (interrupted by older women screaming at someone on the street). Over the summer, we also walked from Midtown East to the Lower East Side for no reason. It was her idea. She bought blueberries or blackberries and maybe ate them all. We talked over what had been three years. She walked because she wanted to walk. I walked because I liked the companionship in going nowhere together, the endlessness of being with another person.

36

Anxiety lives in my upper throat and crying lives in my lower throat. I often mixed up the two. But there are subtle differences. Though both clench the throat, perhaps even in the same place, anxiety pulls with a sense of helplessness, of no release. Crying is more like release. All this tension builds up inside until I don’t have to hold it anymore. Like a glass of water about to overfill. Like the water tumbling out of the glass in a crystalline sheet that bundles more than it could take, the sharp relief of giving up, of giving out.

37

Sound is traveling touch, Rebecca read somewhere, and as usual I want to ask about purpose, end, incident. Traveling touch is not searching for anybody. It is in fact around for anyone near enough to hear it, like the nineteenth-­century French villages whose borders were drawn by the reach of the church bell. They were all far apart enough then. Summer in the city leaves my church bells ringing over others, waiting for resonance. Resonance is like two hands dipped in each other, the sudden rise of volume.

38

In a dream, I called the police at least two times, maybe three, because I was tired of trying to stop adults from hurting each other by myself. This was before I knew about the police. Then there were other times that I don’t know how to count, when my small and growing body held two adults apart, or one of them, as I was seven, eight, twelve. I have never imagined this from the outside view, where I can see what I was living through.

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She tells me she feels guilty for giving birth to me. What I am—I’ve gone further than gambling, drug addiction, death—I’ve killed the image of her daughter. I tell her she must feel so much pain, that I understand what she’s going through. Then I hang up.

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Rebecca says, in a lecture for her Intro to Poetry and Poetics class, that poetry is the process of making nothing happen. Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s there, nothing’s the matter. What is nothing? Nothing must now be something. And how can nothing become something—who makes it something? When you say it is nothing, poetry is where that nothing goes. It is insistently useless.

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I am reading around trying to find my emotional present. Because I am out of touch with my feelings, the whole exercise is to try and find mental techniques that will help me reach, say, a flutter in my stomach, a knot in my throat, many days after the fact. When I am anxious, I have a strong desire to do something that will fix what I’m feeling. I had an anxiety attack in public recently. This has never happened. Because it had never happened, it was not happening, and I was not looking for an appropriate time to tell you that I needed help, that my throat was constricting and I had to spend all my mental energy on making eye contact with very lovely people who were meeting me for the first time. The truth is, I thought it was just a stomach thing. Or a drunken thing. Anything can be anything when I don’t want something to be happening.

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We watch TV to see a part of ourselves. Any part, any glimpse. We are searching for people living our same lives, who won’t shy away when we watch them, see them, get to know them. We watch because we don’t know how to ask questions, to invite the truth from others. We watch because no one has invited the truth from us, and we are searching for a direction that is more right or more possible than this one, which seems very exhausting to continue in, to go on in.

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For three years, I watch any TV that I hear of with lesbian characters. I say lesbian because that is what I was looking for at the time, and because there wasn’t much differentiation in TV shows then. I streamed what I could. This was only possible when the computer was in my room, a hot brick of plastic: a door. The women were white, but that I ignored in the very rare faces of longing. I saw myself in longing: right before the kiss, looking without having to look away, being made of so much and finally landing somewhere, anywhere, with someone who would love this part of me. The thing about hiding one thing about yourself for ten years is that it warps your perception of the real you. What you must protect against all odds becomes your defect, your truth, your failure, your success. It becomes the most authentic thing you have because you have no means of going further, of wanting more. There were consequences for knowing myself. I didn’t want to want more.

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Diana and I stumble across a shop that has complimentary tarot readings. We wait for over twenty minutes. It’s worth it. My question for the reading: how can I move toward a healthier emotional life in the next year? I am so anxious that I have a hard time breathing while the reading happens in front of me. You need time to process your life. You need to leave your mind. Thinking too hard about what’s in front of you is the easiest way to lose it. Trust your body for a while. Trust your body to think for you, too; trust your body to remember. Remember, your body also has an interest. You can’t think your way into it.

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Form gives space for something to exist. You have to dig in yourself to find what you’ll put in it. Places you don’t know appear. Poems are a way to ask for what exists, to invite what wants to be visible.

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Originally, this was a book about unspoken desire, the knowledge of bodies forbidden to me. I never thought about it in relation to myself. I’ve been denied my own body. Of course, this book has always been about me. But what I recognize now is that I have desire; that I want to be wanting.

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I thought love was a trapdoor out of loneliness. Hint: it super isn’t. Hint: if you believe in something more than you believe in yourself, things start to get fuzzy in how much you can hear yourself: what you need—no, what you want. During my tarot reading, Leah draws a card called Reception. The card shows a naked, gender-­ambiguous person resting in a blue sea puddled in a larger hand. Reception is what I think of when I wake up today at 5am, realizing that the string of innocuous dreams I had were actually nightmares. I know because I am exhausted. In one dream, I walked quickly through a museum trying to find something, but it closed before I got to it. In another dream, I had to roast a chicken for a competition. It was perfect and I got a lot of compliments and I felt nothing about it. In the dream with the museum, I tried to go again the next day. You were there with me but you were too far ahead of me, propelled by something I wasn’t a part of. Then, what is so unnatural to me: to believe that what I can’t control will be kind to me. When you walk away from me, I hear you saying that you will always be with me. When I wake up, I hear you telling me it’s okay. Things eventually happen. It’s not always true that when someone disappears, they never come back, even if that has been my experience.

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Louise Glück is surprised by her own surprise. I am surprised to be delighted. Walking down the street, having just made a new friend at a coffeeshop that secretly has ramen for breakfast, which has been my dream for a very long time. Ramen because, as children, my cousins and I would take a little money from our parents for the street stalls and order beef stew or ground pork or soupless noodles, all of which were spiced to the point where we’d have to order bowls of soup just to soothe our mouths. I loved black vinegar, which I mixed into my noodles to settle the bite of chili with the bite of sourness. Ramen because we would walk across the concrete streets and once I thought I had a rock in my sandal but actually it was the very tip of a nail that had lodged in my sole, which I did not discover until home. Ramen for the hot summer days before they were too hot against the dusty sewage and the farmers who my grandmother visited for groceries. Her hair still black. Ramen which I ate with my dad every lunch or night, because he didn’t have time to cook, didn’t have time to be home. Ramen for the days when I was very lonely, having no one to talk to, not knowing that I wanted to talk. Ramen which comforted me next to the books that also comforted me. Ramen that made me a friend this morning, over a talk about breakfast, and how to find words that we don’t know how to say in English.

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My parents are invested in inheritance as power. On the phone, my mother guesses that she’s lived a hard life. She’s worked hard. I try to tell her that she should see the doctor, try and take care of herself. She hasn’t slept very much this month. It can’t be done, she says—who else will work for us?

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Robin Coste Lewis talks about a professor who professed that poetry is silence. How curious that words would be the tool to give silence. Silence is a means of consideration. It hangs on the wall hook, suspended against meaning, against utility. Silence is the consideration of meaning, the process of meaning, the place where meaning is born.

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My mother tells me something. Has she been lonely? There was so much I couldn’t see as a child. And then it was too much to try and save her, to help her feel better and feel a little less lonely. I felt like I failed at loving her. I felt like I failed at saving her from loneliness. As a kid, you can’t know that this isn’t your job. As a kid, you can’t know that the people you love can live and die for completely other reasons.

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Sitting in Taylor’s kitchen, having texted her at 6:20am to let her know that I wasn’t okay. The coffee is good as tasting all of it; the milk is local and organic. We don’t see the sun; I don’t see the sun; maybe Taylor’s looking for both of us. All I say are the things that I already know, but it feels real when I say them; reasoning out loud to someone who is really listening is stronger than the voices that constrict me. For a long time, I didn’t have them. But repeating them feels like the ice as it finally melts; the unknown hold of the permafrost giving way to putrid trash from autumn, dead grass, and I love the seasons. Here I am taking the shade of spring, brown and black, the early bone.

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Reading Robert Hass in bed, at it again: collecting myself. Alongside words, I feel charged with what they signify: me, this world, the poem’s speaker who has glimpsed something, thrown it down. On all counts, I reject a universality of poetry. But nothing in me says I am different from a poem. It’s not universal: it’s language as it joins me with memory, with me.

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Agnes Martin works in grids beginning around the mid-1950s. I tell Ariel that the grid is like tarot: a finite system through which we can process ourselves. Agnes Martin has a painting called A greystone that is half-­inch-­by-­eighth-­inch grid cells dabbed once with the same dab of paint. I imagine her with her canvas, seventy-­two by seventy-­two inches, taking an entire day to draw these grey stones. The painting is a memory turned again and against itself. The painting is the paint-­ing. Who knows what the stone was to Agnes, what she learned by giving herself to it repeatedly. They took nothing away from each other.

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You tell me that the old you is dead. I am also not who I used to be. The revolution is emotional. I found a reason to not fear death. I found more reasons to live, reasons to change what is living inside me and around me. The revolution is that I care about my own safety, that I believe my life is valuable and worth pursuing. As in, I am worth the work of transformations. As in, I do not fear how I will emerge from myself, or how many times.

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When I loved someone I finally understood that I was worthy of love. It seems a contradiction. What I learned was this capacity for giving required me to give to myself, that it was possible to do so. Someone wants you alive. They are not the only one who insists this. Love exists in me like a counterbalance.

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Even though I didn’t know M very well, I am also grieving. I don’t feel like I’m allowed to grieve for someone I didn’t know well, because we’re asked to choose who we invest in, we’re asked to choose who is worthy of love. M lived in my community. I saw her every so often at parties, dinners, movies. I love my community and therefore I love her, so of course I am grieving, it is justified to love another human being for no reason. My friends know how she lived and they will live instead. When she was alive she lived with my friends, together they made all kinds of life, and now she lives in their lives and can live with me.

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Imagine every day you wake up to wild commitment. Wild as in not the same place, but the moving place, playing place, changing place. When I write through my happiness, I commit to it again: I commit to feeling, deeply, not what happiness I have but how I came to orbit around it, attract it, cherish it. I fall asleep and wake up. If there’s a thing I want to teach me, it’s how I live my light.

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For two weeks now, I have been cooking for myself. I notice what I eat. I don’t drink coffee, or forget to eat at all. My body is feeling better on a morning when I swallow my vitamin D pill and have a new omelette. I am noticing that I feel calmer, more focused, and that I can see what I pass on the sidewalk. Today, I want to buy some teflon tape and a new radiator air vent. Today, I want to shake around some new keys.

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The male dancers are paired with other male dancers. They dance in a way that echoes sameness. Yet that is not what I feel with women, or what draws me to women. When I was a woman, I didn’t feel the same as them, or they to me. Our sameness was only a cover. This is the great secret of lesbianism if there is a secret that even I did not know. We do not want the same things. There is no other woman. There is only woman to woman to woman.

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Reading Raymond Carver, the answer comes to me: I cannot write alone. This is the entire thesis. For the reasons that I write, I cannot write alone.

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Our erotic energy lives in our work, Zoë says over the phone. She means it in an Audre Lorde sense: an outpouring of pleasure from within us, given back to us. She means her research. And I am writing again, although I’m not quite sure about what.

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I have been writing to women, women of color, queers, gentlequeers, spectra, crystals, animals. I want fame with you, I don’t want to be famous. Let’s redo what it means to be famous. I am famous because I am in search like you. I have been writing for you. I have been writing for myself. I too want to be familiar. What else could famous mean?

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I ask Tonya Foster about sound and sense and its place in her poetics. She says that she believes in registers of language: registers that each invite a particular audience. She wants to write to her mom. In fact, her mother called her after A Swarm of Bees in High Court released and, on reading the book out loud, she said she understood. Foster says that listening is a type of work. Foster says that she believes authenticity is connected to presence, to sensing and being in a particular place, and that our most inauthentic moments actually happen when we are most in ourselves.

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Playing violin has always been like this. When I play, I am the closest receiver of my own music. I am close to my body, which sways with the sounds I’m making; my body, which pulls the bow and presses into the warm neck of the instrument. Music is also an instrument; a guide; the closest I have ever been to my own, momentous love.

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In your dreams, you see one person again and again. For many times, they will come to you as they seemed to you and as you wanted them to be. For many times, you will have the same dream. Then there will be the dream where they don’t appear at all. You write a poem for your family, the one you do not talk to. In the dream, it’s not a poem, but a process. How you hold them through the rooms. How you walk from one room to another, your dedication to them above a disappearing podium. In the dream, you are helpless yet powerful. You will stay because you want to stay: among magnolias dipped with the weight of themselves, the weight of their buds. Among slushed ice roads you can walk on without help. You can love but don’t need to love. It is night but a bright orange candle lights the world. At the end of the dream, you will reach this person. They will have been waiting for you and you will not be hungry, you will have eaten the magnolias, the candlelight, the roads. They appear to you on a couch that could be just any other couch, but one that also looks like them. In the dream, they tell you about the rest of the dream. They tell you and their eyes are gleaming in the orange candle, seeming filled with tears with no need to shed them. This is just how they are. And you will see this person just as they are. How they have always wanted to appear to you. People who love you will tell you their lives. This someone tells you, for the rest of your life.

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Last night, I had a dream about giving a speech on art. I had no notes and felt awash with calm. Why is art necessary?, the first line ran, and nothing was easier to answer because it was so unanswerable. It occurs to me that an answer would have ended my speech, and what I wanted was to ask something repeatedly, to spend my life on continuing the question. It is a certain life and not its answer that is worthy of being repeated. Invitation, invocation, request.

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Robert Hass has a poem named “Fall.” It is fall. Today at the farmers market, I eased my eyes on chili peppers so bright and gangly and round that I couldn’t hold them all. There were so many. I wondered what they all were holding. In the poem, Hass’s “me” and “you” are picking mushrooms with a field guide. They get close to the names of things. What they take from the earth, they try to name in their bodies. What is it like to eat? The tongue splits for what the tongue wants—sour rolling on the bitterness of lime, the sweet tang of tomatoes. Without direction, Taylor gives me a carrot to eat because they are good and in season right now. The carrot is wet inside, and sublime.

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Of all the things I have done, I am most proud of our relationship, of picking up the pieces of investing in each other again and again. I am proud to trust you, despite the pain of trusting that lives in me every day. In every way, I was raised to kill this: the impulse to build and protect a place where you and I can live as ourselves. And not just live. When I hear you on the phone, there’s always something else going on, something’s happened that will change you or change me, and it’s not those moments but ourselves that we share with each other. Not out of necessity, but abundance.

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NOTES

The Robin Coste Lewis lecture referenced was recorded on Friday, March 11, 2016, at Poets House. “Playing violin” is for Allison Woerner. “Agnes Martin tells me” refers to her selected writings in Agnes Martin: Writings / Schriften (English and German Edition), edited by Dieter Schwarz. “I don’t count the references” describes Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. “Imagine every day you wake up” is after Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, poem 240. “I ask Tonya Foster” refers to a gathering in April 2016 for “Poetic Image for the People,” a workshop hosted by Ana Božicˇevic´, with Tonya Foster. “Maureen McLane tells Rebecca” refers to “Uses of Poetry,” a reading and discussion between Rebecca Ariel Porte and Maureen McLane on February 2, 2017, hosted by the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. 75

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Portions of this book first appeared in the limited-­edition chaplet DIARY (Belladonna* no. 193, 2016) and The Margins. Thank you to Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and the Millay Colony for the Arts for supporting me and believing in my work with fellowship and time. To my cohort and the staff at Asian American Writers’ Workshop in particular—Rami Karim, Kyle Lucia Wu, Mariam Bazeed, Jyothi Natarajan, and Yasmin Majeed—thank you for welcoming me and collaborating with me with your hearts. Thank you to the teachers who gave me permission: Allison Woerner, who gave me permission to believe in my own value; Kathleen Smith, who gave me permission to write; Saskia Hamilton, who gave me permission to trust my own writing. To my mentors and friends Rachel Zucker and Erica Hunt, my gratitude for their time and attention with this book, and with me.

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Thank you to Carl Phillips for selecting and understanding this book, and to the readers at Yale who advanced it. To my friends, whose presences have supported and buoyed me and whom I celebrate today: Diana Clarke, Jean Yoon, Zoë Berman, Wei-­Ming Watson, Kate Welsh, Rebecca Ariel Porte, Milo Inglehart, Taylor Lanzet, Sevan Gatsby, Emma Healey, Ariel Goldberg, Michelle Meier. Special thanks to Elizabeth Onusko, who encouraged me to do more and ask for more with this book. And to the family who chooses me. Thank you for spending these years with me.

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