From “The Winged Seed: A Remembrance”

What did my father mean when he said Remembrance? I remember I was born in the City of Victory on a street called Jilan Industri, where each morning the man selling sticky rice cakes goes by pushing his cart, his little steamer whistling, and by noon the lychee man passes, his head in a rag, bundles of the fruit strung on the pole slung on his neck, while at his waist, at the end of a string, a little brass bell shivers into a fine and steady seizure. I remember I was named twice, once at my birth, and once again after my father, in his prison cell, dreamed each night the same dream, in which the sun appeared to him as a blazing house, wherein dwelt a seed, black, new, dimly human. And so one morning, at a white metal table in the visiting yard, he and my mother decided my name, which, said one way, indicates the builded light of the pearl, and said another, the sun.

It was 1959, the year of the pig, eighteen months after I was born, that my father was arrested by the military police working under President Sukarno, because of things he’d been saying to a handful of men and women who came down every evening to the banks of the Solo River to wash their rice, or beat their clothes clean on the stones, or shit behind the makeshift rattan screens. He’d been warned several times before his arrest that what he talked about those evenings, sitting beside the Solo, might be considered seditious. When he didn’t stop, the Indonesian War Administration accused him of being a spy, and threw him in prison for nineteen months. But what could a person say about night and seeds, for it was night and seeds my father talked about, that might so offend a military regime? What is a seed? My son’s fourth-grade textbook says something about monocots and dicots. Is it monocot or dicot seeds dicta­tors fear? What was so dangerous about the letters he wrote to my mother and had smuggled out of jail that she had to burn them immediately after she read them? What does a seed enclose that might be considered dan­gerous to anyone? What was it my father said, standing at evening by the Solo?

Did he say seed planted deep at one sill declares a new house at a further turn of the sun?

Did he say seed is good news, our waiting done?

Did he say seed is told, kept cold, scored with a pock­etknife, and then left out to die, in order to come into a further seed, speaking the father seed, leading to seed, if seed can be said to lead, a road we sow ahead of our ar­rival?

What did he say? Think.

Once upon a time, a seed went walking down a spiral stair, having gotten it in his head he wanted to become a rice. When, he wondered, will I lie down a seed only, a lone stone, and wake up an assembly that feeds, a great rice? He wanted to feed. Seed dies, he thought, but rice never sleeps, rice is unvanquished. So he went walking, and ask­ing, Are you my father? and Are you my mother? of a door, a mirror, and a kitchen knife. The door pinched him, the mirror declared nothing the seed recognized, and the kitchen knife said, Good night.

What? asked the seed. Did you say something?

Toll, whispered the knife.

Toll? asked the seed.

Pay the toll. You must reckon with your passage.

I have no money, said the seed.

Then I kill you now, whispered the knife. The seed shuddered, and a very thin layer of skin sloughed off.

Wait, he said,  I can give you a riddle.

A riddle? asked the blade.

I’m good at riddling. I’m a seed.

The blade considered. Alright, he said, but I’m not bad at riddling myself. So tell a riddle I can’t unriddle, or you don’t pass. No, tell me three.

The seed thought hard. His first riddle was this:

What an unlikely hand, the wing. What weird feet, claws. What fine math, a nest. What a strange bird, the ear that speaks a flower. It’s nearly an open eye. How dark the ore that lies awake all night. And what an un­likely miner, the heart who comes, a hand his only lamp. And what an odd compass, a pebble in a shoe, the heel the only comfort. And what a strange mountain, a seed. What an unlikely kingdom. How narrow a house it keeps. So little shelters us. How still the next world lies inside it.

That’s easy, whispered the knife, scraping himself against a whetstone. The answer is: pilgrim. You’re down to two.

The seed thought harder. His second riddle was this:

My foot, a balding paw, would like to be a hand, re­calls too well the wolf it is, would like to play a piano, compose a sonata, knot a tie, don a uniform of thirty buttons. The boot is what it dreams. It loves the heel, adores the glove. My wolf despises what it wants to be, my hand. It steps on the hand, would extinguish the seed buried in the valley of the thumb and index, in the girlish wrist, the ticklish palm, for the hand claps and the wolf dances, the fingers count and he leads the path to water, the map drawn on the foot’s own ticklish belly, which a man reads by a hand that touches, that loves the wolf that bites.

The knife yawned. You better do better than that. You’ll be dead sooner than you think. The answer is: siblings.

The seed began to worry. What was he to do? Those were two of his best riddles, and the knife unriddled them without breaking a sweat on his gleaming fore­head. Then he told another:

A woman draws twelve animals on the wall. A man counts the eyes and feet and comes up odd. The window common to them says Today, and today a man will come. A man but not a man, riding but not sitting, standing but not leaning on a ladder, bone. A man ring­ing, rung with the twelve secret hips of honey, a signal odor of chrysanthemums, the recipe for snow, and the permanent address of the rose. His kisses seal the cross­bar under which the two come and go: once to fetch the water and bring it back, once to fetch the children and bring them home, and one last time to hear the folded note a bird left at the end of their human year, all fire.

The knife was stumped. He suspected a trick. A trick, he mumbled, a trick. You’re tricking me.

No, said the seed. It’s a riddle, and a good one. Now hear another. With confidence renewed the seed told an­other:

The woman I love gives half her face to the night. The other half she offers to me and one long window that stands at the end of the longest hall of the house I abandoned in a field of dandelion one day while the seed was blowing and the townspeople pulled down the bell-house and the one-eyed bell, and put up a blind clocktower. Is it my mother’s house? Is it my father’s? From where come the voices of the children?

The woman I love gives half her face to the night, in which she pauses on a stair to hear the water falling down for miles, and coming from unroofed leagues, and cold, so cold it numbs her mouth and wakes a seed, kissed into flowering.

The knife was almost wild with rage. This better not be a trick, he whispered.

Do you need more time?  asked the seed, or shall I assume I’ve told two which are beyond you? Let me tell my third, then I’ll be on my way. The seed began.

My right hand writes my letters, my left hand smuggles a seed into the ground. My hungry hand blesses. My fat hand reprimands. But my fat worm gets hungry, and though my woman lies unguarded, I ask where’s the door? Where the morning glory closes at evening. Which is past the great meadows of cotton gins, and steel mills abandoned to clover and the honeybee, in whose antennae hums a spiral code and bright arithmetic.

Where the morning glory closes at evening, an unfinished house stands. And the house accomplished. There a bird flits between opposite sills, a facing ledge and my own, which I can’t see, many dark elbows down and hidden by an eave.

Opposite houses and the one I inhabit is twice-hidden, by light all day, and by nearness the long night, when I lean on a jamb to hear a bird call from its unseen sleep. Opposite calls, and one is heard, the one without a destiny, untroubled by the color of your hair, unencumbered of any wish, while unheard goes the very shape of longing, the sum of an unencompassable face, the call without seam or margin, and we face it.

So tell the man whose head is bowed, who’s waiting to hear from me, if he looks up he’ll see the guests are leaving the feast. Tell him while his one hand inches along the frayed margin of his father’s cloth his mother mends, the other hand falls to the threshing floor to lie, blind among the blind grain.

But don’t tell him my name.

And he who loved me once, who has forgotten me, all of me fallen from him like scales or old thorns, making his journey lighter, tell him his shadow of discarded leagues arrives before him everywhere he goes. And she who had forgotten me, who thinks of me tonight, doubling me by patiently not finding me under her cooking spoon, in either furrow between her eyes, tell her I’m close, the insect counting in her unguarded wrist.

But don’t tell either of them my name.

And the boy who would make my picture with his pencil, who draws the lines over and over, multiplying me, his drawing hand growing sore, his paper beginning to tear, tell that one who darkens me, and darkens me, and darkens me, don’t cry! The path relinquished finds its way is home by a star’s influence. Lift your face from your hands, tell him, and set it toward an indoor sea. See? It becomes what it faces. And the hands, the hands hang. Leave them. Tell him they’ll find water. But don’t tell him my name.

It’s nice riddling with you, but I really must go now. I’m going to be a rice. Then he started walking away, but as he turned to go, the knife, incensed at having been bested, suspicious at having been duped, flew down from the cutting board on which he’d been standing, and struck the seed, killing him on the spot.

But what is a seed? Is it the apple? Is it a Kingdom? To hold a seed, weightless, in the palm of your hand, is to think, Soon. If it is a morning glory seed, you hold both the flower and where the flower closes at evening, where another country begins, and double doors open toward us, the seam of their parting widening to vanquish utter margins unto the first day: Noon, a woman is dressing for our journey together, combing her hair opposite the direction of our arrival. Her name appears in ledgers of ships whose masts have long passed out of view, dis­pelling any rumor of a horizon or setting sun. And soon, the sun, that bell, struck some million years ago, will tell the note it meant. Soon, a seed will wake, who lay all night along a ledge. Meanwhile, I cradle in my hand this odorless seed like one dead, like one who recalls nothing of his actions or inactions, one who bears inside now only a remembered shapeliness of certain desires and needs, no longer recognizable as desire or need, but things more elemental, akin to oceans, sandstorms, and the yearning wings reveal by their action in time. I re­member the back gate where I planted morning glory seven years ago. Walking there last fall, I noticed that the vine had dropped all its flowers. But the leaves were intact; green, heart-shaped, they hid the pods that kept the seeds.

A morning glory’s seedpods look like miniature sul­tans’ turbans and each is as big as a good-size drop of  blood. Shaking them a little, the rattling made me think that each might hold inside it a meticulous clock. Breaking them open, I saw they were merely the gold husk to the blacker thoughts, the seeds! Thought is black! Why does the morning glory have no fruit? What does the flower signal? Each year I must wait past the glory’s green polyp, past the bruise-colored bud, and later than the lavender flower, in order to break into the gold pods, pop them between my fingers, and scatter black, news-bearing seeds in a glass dish.

Now, my wife, I have the presiding feeling that you and I might share the same body. Against all reason and rationale, my body feels convinced to its deepest cell it is continuous with the body of you who lie beside me, who in fact lies the length of my body, shoulder to ankle­bone, your hip set inside the bowl of my loins. And yet, at the same time, you remain out of reach, utterly un­reachable, as though you did not lie here at all, but waited for me on the other side of a country only my fly­ing to you names, and names so softly you need not waken to hear my approach, which is the shape of this night.

Love, wake up. Don’t sleep. What is the nature of our shared body? What garment could we possibly weave to contain it? Would the garment not be, in fact, the very body, and what we daily make between us? Therefore the stars figure in. A garment not made on any loom of bone and a red shuttle. A dress, this body we share. Yet, what is its shape? Is it a fish? Is it a house? Is it a burning cross, a fountain of fatal birds, clocksprings newly wet in the fire, a nest of punctual seeds, quiver of irrevocable arrows, a clock tower telling the name of the traveler re­ceding unto all four compass points of today? Is it today? What is today? A door swinging four ways in the wind to let go a handful of birds, seeds, a woman asleep in a nest of thorns, a joy deferred? Is it a church? Our shared body is a church, then, and the size of a seed, as any true church must be. So this woman and I are wed at a seed, and I weave a various garment for that seed, a seed gar­ment.

But what is a seed? Something I never read in any book keeps me awake tonight, something my father said. And my father is coming for me. I feel the gravity of his arrival as though my own body drew him from the East, as though even now he tramples the dew in order to step out of the night and hand me a stone I can’t bear to refuse, yet must die to receive. What is the question he will surely ask of me? What do I need to know? Close my eyes. If we’re very quiet, we can hear the sun. Listen. The nighthawk! I hear the nighthawk!

Its cries unlock our hair. With us all summer, hunting, he makes two sounds. His circling overhead is accompa­nied by a near-cry, while as he dives he emits a groan, an almost comic O, to remind the listener that any cry he thinks he hears is in himself. The first is the one that scrapes the scalp and tightens a single thread about the heart. The second is a croak. I hear him every night at this hour. He dives and turns to the call his body casts ahead, scoping by sound, sweeping the insect air, to feast on little wings in the dark somewhere. If he combs our hearts, may he not find us random. Nor too determined. Rather, let. The way the sun is let, all those rooms, and for hours, listen. Wind in the leaves, our children in the next room breathing. Listen.

A man who lives among women and children, if I’m very quiet, mornings, I can sometimes hear, as though out of the vacant future, the voice of a child reading out loud pages turning in another room. And if I’m patient, I can hear the patience in the mother’s voice urging softly, Go on.

A man who lives among women and children, I can some mornings, if I’m very quiet, hear, as though out of the purchased past, a boy reading out loud to his mother, in a room made quiet by her. In that room, even now, the birds unlisten morning into a blue hearing, prelude to the verdict sun.

But here it is night, and anyone awake this late, weighing for himself seeds and forgetfulness, the white grains of his insomnia and the weight of the whole night, must begin to suspect he is of no particular origin, though sit at a window long enough, late enough, and you may yet hear a secret you’ll tomorrow, parallel to the morning, tell on a wide, white bed, to a woman like a sown ledge of wheat. Or you may never tell it, you who lean across the night and miles of the sea, to arrive at a seed, in whose dim house resides a thorn, or a wee man, carving a name on a stone at a fluctuating table of water, the name of the one who has died, the name of the one not born unknown. Someone has died, and someone is not yet born. And while the ink is wet, I write. While the well is black. And the children dream of haunted schoolrooms. As long as someone looks for me, and I go unfound by wand or compass, tendril or seed.

And what was it my father said about the seed? Things my father said I can’t completely remember. But the voice he used remains, without enduring. And a fes­tival is foretold by a hidden calendar at the heart of a strong reiterating pip, presently entombed, awaiting breakage, while I sit here holding it, waiting.

I sit here as I did with my sister and brothers when we were children, we who sat very still for our father, while he made drawing after drawing of us in pencil, his hand moving over the paper seemingly on its own, his eyes trained on what he was drawing, us, and not on what he’d drawn. How bored and frustrated I was those days I sat so still for him, and hours at a time. And as his hand moved to make a face or an arm appear on a white tablet which he held propped on his knees below his own face, I could feel large parts of myself being vanquished by his gaze and his drawing hand, as though, being translated that way to rough page and graphite by my father, there would soon remain nothing of me. Or else there would be so little of me, I might eventually appear. For he was making me go away so completely, I was beginning to ar­rive. And as his hand and eyes realized more and more of me, less and less of me remained. I was nothing but a lump of heavy time expiring, a day vase going porous, a stone, a seed. I was one of those seeds my father kept in the pocket of his suit which hung in the closet.