Mura - The colors of desire: poems

ALSO BY DAVID MURA Poetry
After We Lost Our Way (1989) Nonfiction
A Male Grief: Notes on Pornography and Addiction (1987)
Turning Japanese: Memoirs of a Sansei (1991) A N A NCHOR B OOK
PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY
a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036 A NCHOR B OOKS , D OUBLEDAY , and the portrayal of an anchor are trademarks of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Book design by Julie Duquet Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mura, David.
The colors of desire : poems / David Mura.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3563.U68C65 1995
811.54dc20 95-6587
CIP eISBN: 978-0-307-78802-3 Copyright 1995 by David Mura ALL RIGHTS RESERVED v3.1 The poems in this volume were previously published in the following publications: Asian America: Harvest at Minidoka Internment Camp Crazyhorse: Listening, To H.N. Colorado Review: The Colors of Desire Indiana Review: Notes on Pornography Abandoned, Issei: Song of the First Years in America The New England Review: The Blueness of the Day Green Mountains Review: Gardens We Have Left The River Styx: Issei Strawberry Listening reprinted in The Best of Crazyhorse and The 1990 Puschart Prize XV (1990-1991). The poem was printed as a special chapbook, Listening, published by the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, illustrated and designed by Kinji Akagawa. The Colors of Desire won first place in the 1991 Martha Scott Trimble Poetry Award given by The Colorado Review and was reprinted in New American Poets of the 90s (Godine Press, 1991).

Gardens We Have Left was also published in The Open Boat: Poems from Asian America (Anchor/Doubleday, 1993). To H.N. and Chorus on the Origins of Lust are included in Premonitions: The Kaya Anthology of New Asian American Poetry (Kaya, 1994). My gratitude to Cyrus Cassells, Charles Flowers, Garrett Hongo, Deborah Keenan, Susan Mitchell, David Wojahn, and especially to my hakujin no tomodachi for their generous help on this manuscript. The late Lynda Hull, a remarkable poet, was a valuable teacher and critic for me. My thanks also to Li-Young Lee, Valerie Lee, Sheila Murphy, Alexs Pate, Gerald Stern, Quincy Troupe, and Alan Soldofsky for their support.

This work was supported by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Loft McKnight Award of Distinction, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Rockefeller Foundations Bellagio Retreat Center. Finally, my greatest debt and thanks and love go to my wife, Susie, without whom these pages would not exist. For Aunt Ruth, Aunt Baye, and Aunt Miwako

Taste this strawberry, spin it in motion on the whirl of your tongue, look west towards Watsonville or some other sleepy California town, spit and wipe your sleeve across your mouth, then bend down again, dipping and rising like a piston, like fire, like a swirling dervish, a lover ready to ravish this harvest, this autumn of thirty-one or eight or nine, years when, as everyone declines around you, as swing and Capra redefine an American dream, as some are deferred and some preferred, and some complain, and some confer and strike, and are stricken, are written out of history, you have managed your own prosperity, a smacking ripeness on the vine, acres and acres you mine as your own, as your childrens whose deed it is, knowing you own nothing here, youre no one here but your genes, the ones who spit back so readily English on their tongues, tart and trickier, phrases that blow past you, winking, even as they sink in, youre losing them, youre gaining a harvest, a country, a future, so much to lose when, in biting your tongue, the red juice flows between your teeth with the memory of strawberries and loam and sweat, of summers in the valley when you made it before the war had come. 1 Photograph of a Lynching (circa 1930) These men? In their dented felt hats, in the way their fingers tug their suspenders or vests, with faces a bit puffy or too lean, eyes narrow and close together, they seem too like our image of the South, the Thirties. Of course they are white; who then could create this cardboard figure, face flat and grey, eyes oversized, bulging like an ancient totem this gang has dug up? At the far right, in a small browed cap, a boy of twelve smiles, as if responding to whats most familiar here: the cameras click. And though directly above them, a branch ropes the dead negro in the air, the men too focus their blank beam on the unseen eye.

Which is, at this moment, us. Or, more precisely, me. Who cannot but recall how my father, as a teenager, clutched his weekend pass, passed through the rifle towers and gates of the Jerome, Arkansas, camp, and, in 1942, stepped on a bus to find white riders motioning, Sit here, son, and, in the rows beyond, a half dozen black faces, waving him back, Us colored folks got to stick together. How did he know where to sit? And how is it, thirty-five years later, I found myself sitting in a dark theater, watching Behind the Green Door with a dozen anonymous men? On the screen a woman sprawls on a table, stripped, the same one on the Ivory Snow soap box, a baby on her shoulder, smiling her blond, practically pure white smile. Now, after being prepared and serviced slowly by a handful of women, as one of them kneels, buries her face in her crotch, she is ready: And now he walks in Lean, naked, black, streaks of white paint on his chest and face, a necklace of teeth, its almost comical, this fake garb of the jungle, Africa and All-America, black and blond, almost a joke but for the surge of what these lynchers urged as the ultimate crime against nature: the black man kneeling to this kidnapped body, slipping himself in, the screen showing it all, down to her head shaking in a seizure, the final scream before he lifts himself off her quivering body I left that theater, bolted from a dream into a dream. I stared at the cars whizzing by, watched the light change, red, yellow, green, and the haze in my head from the hash, and the haze in my head from the image, melded together, reverberating.

I dont know what I did afterwards. Only, night after night, I will see those bodies, black and white (and where am I, the missing third?), like a talisman, a rageful, unrelenting release. 2 1957 Cut to Chicago, June. A boy of six. Next year my hero will be Mickey Mantle, but this noon, as father eases the Bel-Air past Wilson, with cowboy hat black, cocked at an angle, my skin dark from the sun, Im Paladin, and my six-guns point at cars whizzing past, blast after blast ricocheting the glass. Like all boys in such moments, my face attempts a look of whattoughness? bravado? ease? until, impatient, my fathers arm wails across the seat, and I sit back, silent at last.

Later, as we step from IGA with our sacks, a man in a serge suitstained with ink? steps forward, shouts, Hey, you a Jap? You from Tokyo? You a Jap? A Chink? I stop, look up, I dont know him, my arm yanks forward, and suddenly, the sidewalks rolling, buckling, like lava melting, and I know father will explode, shouts, fists, I know his temper. And then, Im in that dream where nothing happens The ignition grinds, the mans face presses the windshield, and father stares ahead, fingers rigid on the wheel That night in my bedroom, moths, like fingertips, peck the screen; from the living room, the muffled t.v. As I imagine Shane stepping into the dusty street, in the next bed, my younger brother starts to taunt