G R I E F I S T H E R I V E R

WITH A FOREIGN NAME

For the children who have died in Gaza

Grief is the river with a foreign name

that floods your heart, pulling you in

with a musical force you can’t resist

for the song it plays inside the silence

of the things they left: the dress, the doll,

the drawings—transformers each on

the surface that runs through the country

of your heart, which is why we imagine

Earth as Heaven when we see their faces

in the surface of the river, memory’s

mirror, and think they are real, although

we know they are floating to the sea

where they will join the others, although

we swear at the god of time who leads

us by the hand into the water and squeezes

our chests then holds us under for as long

as we can live without breathing while

the birds are singing and the clouds

are floating like letters that form their names

on the pages of sky that just keep turning.

The realm that belongs to Nebulous Vertigo by Belle Ling is both visceral and vibrant, and it is mysteriously familiar. If you come close to it, you will hear how rains eat, how a silken tofu revolts, how the Chinese word for “beans” turns into a speaking persona, and how a telephone bridges the surviving and the afterlife.

LET’S GO BACK TO GRASS FLOWER HEAD

豆:

one and a mouth and the shape of a horn.

Follow me! One vertical, one horizontal.

豆 squeaks its head out of the chalk.

Don’t let 豆 walk out of your square!

We are taught to sing: Grass or flower?

豆 and 荳 and 豆.

It is grass and it is a flower.

豆 is 荳 is 豆.

dau is tofu, tofu is dau.

I’m multiplied like window grids torn apart by the fingers of rains:

Imagine you’re 荳—

                         Let it tiptoe over your skin,

                         be porous in its breaths.

Breathe,

             be ricocheted, be wings.