The Part About Fate or Counterpoint
I want to begin this poem with two stories:
1. In 1984, my mother was pulled over for speeding in a rural, still unnamed village in Taishan. The cop was a forty-year-old man who let her go because of her age and gender. Growing up, my mother would tell me to use my age and gender to get out of this kind of story. She said to hold my body down like a political piece; men were those pieces who would enter my bed at night.2
2. In 2012, I was pulled over for speeding in the Los Alto Hills. I thought about using my expired disability placard to justify speeding. I didn’t have to justify anything. All I did was roll down the window and smile and the forty-something cop let me go.
Most of the rest of this poem happened in 1993. The details: she is beautiful and formidable, real and winning, starred all over. There is a fight now and then for her time. From then on, her killings began to be counted.3
(that evening, those next stars)
Nobody refused to identify her. There were enactments that I thought of as feminist acts, gender as performance. To be a secondary loved one, I had to make and unmake my sex and location all day long. Wherever to go to get away from crude, frozen oil, Gadhafi—all of this goes on.4
(there were no deaths of other women)
The dance opens and the dead woman is twenty-two. I’m twenty-two when a door takes off part of my hand. Gender is a construction, something I had to remake when my hands were no longer formidable.
Beloved, all our days come together in order to tie up all fear, the last violent death. I want to tie up all mistakes and proceed to shoot them. I want to tie up the first dead woman of 1993 and put her with the hands that settled her.5 I want my news to not reiterate hers and the scarred moon to shine in the sky, though there is no separation of harmony over time.
(the next killing was)
Rhythm and Contour, the shape of a music rising and falling. One day Contour’s father left and never returned. Rhythm started speaking a different, incomprehensible language, hoping to move Contour’s mouth. Contour’s clavicle wouldn’t call it music. Rhythm put a muzzle on her mouth. Calling it music, silence was living in contemplation of lovely perverse sex at all. If they died, they’d repel that system of them tied in place, their mouths shut for the walls . . .6
(anxious run at all)
I speak of how the dead woman isn’t me. My body isn’t a game; I’m not powerless to unmake and remake my person.7 I happened in 1993. The game wasn’t round enough.
(the part about fate)
It’s hard to write a beautiful song. Fifteen days later they’d see each other and the would-be dead woman would sound more beautiful than internal structures sung simultaneously. The formidable voices had always been the same, the beloved all the more repeated, the political, military, and developmental pieces reinforcing and never changing, the fate the same one8.
1 (Title) Bolaño, Roberto, trans. Wimmer, Natasha. 2666. New York: FSG, 2008. cf.: “The Part About Fate” (229)
2 Spahr, Juliana. This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, “Nov. 30, 2002.” Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005. cf.: “at night unable to turn over or away from this, the three legged stool of political piece, military piece, and development piece, that has entered into our beds at nights . . .” (18).
3 cf Bolaño: “This happened in 1993. January 1993. From then on, the killings of women began to be counted” (353).
4 cf Spahr: “Gadhafi, nineteen thousand gallons of crude oil in the frozen Nemadji River, all of this exists” (52).
5 cf Spahr: “Beloveds, all our theories and generations came together today in order to find the optimum way of lacing shoes . . . I want to tie everything up when I speak of yous. I want to tie it all up and tie up the world in an attempt to understand the swirls of patterns. But there is no efficient way” (32).
6 cf Bolaño: “. . . if you’re afraid of your own fears, you’re forced to live in constant contemplation of them, and if they materialize, what you have is a system that feeds on itself, a vicious cycle” (383).
7 cf Spahr: “I speak of how the world suddenly seems as if it is a game of some sort, a game where troops are massed on a flat map of the world and if one looks at the game board long enough one can see the patterns even as one is powerless to prevent them” (20).
8 cf Bolaño: “Fifteen days later they would see each other again and everything would be just as it had been the time before . . . the dim light was always the same, the shower was always repeated, the sunsets and the mountains never changed, the stars were the same stars” (384).
Formatting for this poem is adapted to PoetryFoundation.org from the publication We Remain Traditional.