The Remains

—Wuxi, China

Walking out of the new cemetery, my father

takes my hand, having just re-interred the remains

of his own father and his father's two wives—

his mother dead from T.B. by the time he was ten.

He takes my hand and says, Now I can die in peace

even if we didn’t get the actual bones. Village thugs

hired by my uncle made sure the burial mounds

behind the house my father grew up in would not feel

a single shovel blade go in as they stood there

sentinel with arms crossed. My uncle's wife

had a dream that out of the grave's opened gash

demons rushed—ancestral ghosts not wanting to be

disturbed. In less than a decade, bulldozers will come

to take the Liu village down. My grandfather's

ashes, my grandmother's bones, my own father

walking away with two fistfuls of dirt and saying,

This will have to do. So many others have died

who’ve left nothing behind. I'll never come back

to this place again. My father kisses my hand,

I who've flown across twelve time zones to be here

at his side in a borrowed van, me looking out

the window at a countryside once overrun

with Japs marching West along the railroad tracks,

my father and his siblings hiding in an outhouse,

a dead horse found in the schoolyard soon after

the soldiers had gone. Your hands are so soft! I say

to my father. So are yours, he says. Remember

when it was we last held hands? I must have been

a kid, I say, maybe eight, or ten? You were six,

my father says. And I'm still your son, I say,

leaning into his shoulder, our hands the same size.

And I'll always be your father, my father says

before I have the chance to say another word,

my eighty-year-old father nodding off into sleep.

Source: Don't Go Back to Sleep (Saturnalia Books, 2014)