A first attempt at elegy

 

White ginger bowing

1. One comes in order of remembrance, not queen of the memories but its pawn, setting out first on a board, intrepid, fragile. You came to the airport to give me The Tibetan Book of the Dead when I left for my mother’s dying. On day six of your death, I can't find it.

2. To remember death as first principle seems unfair. Call up the midst, the in-between, everyday bardos of being losing itself to being other. Your Manoa cottage fronted a frothy stream populated by orator frogs.

3. I remember when you died, not when you were born. You are on track to appear again, unknown to us. There will be flowers and books and dental surgeries, just like before time, crazy wisdom where wind meets the stream’s song, dentist’s drill screeching like a myna.

4. Your desk was neat, yet you arranged it tirelessly. You were inclined to great drama, and to saying farewell to performance. How many times did you say farewell?

5. You might be born again, but who will recognize the bird or frog, the dragonfly or the snapping turtle?

6. You called me in the very early a.m. as Bryant and I crossed Kansas on a train. You’d taken our car to Kaimuki and parked it in a structure. When you returned, the engine started, so you rolled the windows down. The car would not start. Bryant tried instructions from the top bunk. There was towing and there were ubers. We came home to a white Prius whose windows were black trash bags. A neighbor told me you and Lilith would stand on the sidewalk, staring at one another. You wouldn’t force her to do what she didn’t want to do. One to another stubborn kindness. No negotiations!

7. You always came late to meetings. You were too busy writing haiku about them, I suspect. “why do they call it / ‘meeting,’ when we leave feeling / ragged miles apart?”

8. We invited the young man to tea. You asked him to come early, so you could be aunty. We told him not to be divisive; the community is so small. He said he’d stop. Months later, old posts got regurgitated: dead cigarette mouths, haoles. Aversion to any who did not worship, or agree with him. Exhibit A.

9. There were always prayer beads and incense. I wish I could have told you of the rhythmical beat of “invoice, entry, check”: the 34 counts. We might have marched down a corridor to that mantra. Invoice. Entry. Check. Put it to music and sing it at a meeting.

10. “Away from the toxic stew of colonial isolation,” straight into another, cloaked by constant construction and glitz. You kept talking about the murder of one of our students by her husband. A colonial symptom, you said, unable to prescribe a cure. That was murder and suicide, though the police couldn’t hammer it down, called it double suicide. Under the Volcano explained the colonial darkness, you would say.

11. Hammer. My high school classmate was killed with a hammer by her boyfriend. He was so quickly forgiven; after all, he confessed to his priest. Book title: The Killing of Bonnie Garland, as if she were merely the object of that awful noun. I’d taken her place at a concert because she was afraid of going first. She played the flute. Sina, you loved the breath.

12. Several days before your death, I checked out Rushdie’s Knife. It came in large print. How it feels to have been attacked by someone wielding a knife. How it feels to survive. Hammer and knife killed you. Police say there was an argument. You who worked so hard at right speech. If only the murderer survives, whom can you trust to tell the story except the dead?

13. We intended to stage a performance of workplace violence (emotional). We’d make it funny, maybe wear masks (pre-covid). We’d choreograph the paths of avoidance we took in the hall, then dance them to our colleagues. Walking paths would be dances would be poems.

14. “I need to talk to you about our beloved Sina,” wrote Selina. Facebook video put a yellow cat avatar over my face, which I x’ed out with difficulty. Selina, who drove across Waiheke Island in a car bursting with us poets, belted out Barry Manilow (could it have been??). We laughed before she told me.

15. You were killed in a theater, where only you and the killer performed. Spectators came later, but no one has the audio. This is the only secret left on earth. As it is in heaven, forgive us our trespass. Om mane pame hung.

--for Sina

(the title is the last line of her book, Alchemies of Distance, 2001)