Irene Han: 3 Poems
Double Lives
My grandmother used to say
we can never truly know someone.
They say that Mata Hari charmed
her lovers, passed information to each
side. Maybe people only see what
they want to see. Eye of the day
opens, then closes until the extinction
of a distant beacon. A discrete flash,
I’m searching for a ghost haunting
my mind. I’m tracing the shell
of an empty self. Following a map.
I’m speaking in broken English.
I’m collecting loose leaves.
I’m taking the overhead train,
watching the city change.
I’m walking through the sunset at 9pm,
dreaming of the sand in Indochine.
Now I’m sleeping in the blue
chambers of a young sun king.
I’m giving up my body against soft
velvet, agreeing to both yes and no.
I’m remembering every presence that
once filled a room. I’m hearing what
I touch: rubies, a wooden clock, the midnight sea.
Your Bone Structure
Whenever I walk into your apartment,
I know that I’ve entered a mouth, winding
up the street leading to some iridescent
black sea. You open the front door with a key.
The presence of early visitors lingers:
they have crossed, among half-burned
filters, dense smoke, an empty blue
glass bottle. A photograph of your dead
mother hangs on the wall. Your fallen angel.
I’ve already met her through your absence.
You take after her eyes. Your bone structure.
The Name-of-the-Father reveals an Algerian
past. After drowning, faceless bodies
float to the surface of the Seine. The music
you’ve inherited releases the sorrow of
this history. Parallel fantasies, you’re reading
my origin too: my mother, who pretends
not to notice, who used to paint, sculpt, pray.
My father, who returns every two
years. Even my grandmother, who speaks
Japanese and mourns as a widow for
fifty years. A house we recreate, an image
the mirror reflects: split, blows and
departures. Against the landscape of crashing
waves, wild and wilder, faraway
cries—sirens—descend into Ohhhhh’s.
Structures
All I want is you, but you’re not here.
You’re heading to another coast, towards
the edge of the world. In the light, your eyes
reflect the waves of the sea. They beat back
the sand. Empty shells rattle and disappear
beneath the tide. The sun refracts obtuse
angles and sets at 4 o’clock. In the darkness,
you pull down the shades to isolate the motions
of a raw, relentless motor. I sit in the stillness
of a vacant room and wait for a trailer truck
to split the space in half. Two asymmetrical
compartments remain: an absence and a presence.
***
Against my skin, your mouth feels like a flaming
desert. Clay ridges collapse. After a dust storm
settles, they reconstitute themselves into low dunes.
In the morning, everything will look different:
the earth will reinvent itself and expose the
fragments of lost, white bones. A sole cry interrupts
the silence of the air. Reverberations travel across
latitudes, leave soft, circular marks on my body.
Feedback and dissonant intensities wind in endless
loops, leaving patterns for an extraterrestrial planet
to decipher. Today you are a delicate sound,
dissipating into crests and rare frequencies.
***
Experience maps itself onto countries and people,
drawing artificial boundaries and parallels.
I lose myself in another set of symbols and dream
about the once familiar. Just as one can follow
demarcations in the land, a corpse can also be
divided and imported to foreign territories.
Growing up, I learned that Mao discovered
the revolutionary peasantry. Speaking in a second
language, a specter haunts our past and future
colonies. In some hidden enclave, I practice
the accents I learned from my grandmother.
What is new to me today is the way you taste,
a complex red wine, historical, black cherries.
Irene Han is an academic and also writes poetry. She has interests in psychoanalysis, cinema and various landscapes, particularly, the beach. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.