Origin

Through darkness they came,

covered in ash, scarred by depths

and distance, they bore salt and fire, breath steaming

at edges of decks, hands clutching

railings, their bodies dizzied by the lurching vessel,

trunks pulled by hand, Where are you from? I unwrapped

my legacy from cloth, the marble Buddha

from my grandfather, ancient

as the sea-stained covers of his sutras, the briny odor

of carp centuries old. What are you?

Not only where they were from but who they were

and would become. His strange

past and the mystery of my own face, American?

this question flawed as we all

appeared, my grandfather's birthplace the half of me

I lightened, bleaching my black hair

to reach my girlfriend Amber's blonde.

In her candlelit room, I touched

the mission photo of her

rubbing ointment on the burns

of a hibakusha. Where are

water-filled troughs and the horses' manes

my grandfather combed. The hay he bundled

in twine, you from? Could he have smoothed names

engraved in granite, the scars on the woman's skin, targets

raised on maps? In a light blast What are a city

of nips was erased, you? A blank scape, Go back

no trace of his childhood farm

in Hiroshima, to where I turned

away from the chalkboard scrawled

with Enola Gay, you are a button pushed,

from a bomb dropped, at Amber's picnic

they bowed over grace, and I looked up, didn't

say Amen. Everything rises

when the ground's skin is broken.

Source: Topaz (Four Way Books, 2013)