Bathe All This in Light
My son’s grandmother stood on the platform in Hangzhou
pressed her hands against the glass
.
cried through coal grit, diesel fumes, smack of engines
beginning their pull away.
.
Ting Mama Hua! Ting Mama Hua!
Listen to your mother’s words.
.
Or more literally Hear mother’s language.
And then we couldn’t hear anything
.
through the roar. She ran, still calling,
beside our window as we picked up speed.
.
.
My son said, I don’t like it
when I only see her mouth moving and I can’t hear the words.
.
My dumb tongue
housed like in its small gravel grave.
.
Once she pulled out a black and white faded photograph:
a woman’s face over-exposed
.
so that there was just a trace of her high cheek bones, the black hair knot,
mandarin collar, lips and eyes a shadowy gray curve
.
that would never get darker.
Beautiful. I told her.
.
Or the closest word I could find
She choked That’s right. That’s right. Yes.
.
Beautiful. Beautiful. She pushed her finger hard
against this waxy bit of paper
.
charcoal smudge of mother
trapped in a dusty cloud of light.
.
The first time I brought my toddler to China
she bathed him in a basin on the veranda,
.
splashing, cooing to him—he understood all tongues.
Later, looking at the photos, I marvel
.
at their laughing mouths, water, skin, the afternoon.
What gleamed and glinted in day’s aperture.
.
The train’s wheels thrum.
Through the window—shutter blur:
.
tea-carved mountains, field, sky,
villages stacked with rough brick houses—
.
hillsides scored with tombs’ sealed mouths—
water buffalo laboring darkly in rice and murk—
.
a man tilts under a bicycle
loaded with wooden rakes and rough iron blades—
.
a woman crouches at the edge of a brown puddle
milky laundry water pouring from her enamel basin—
.
all shines, clouds, skims on past.
Negatives shot through with sun, bleeding silver.
.
Between which silence
and which tongue will we find God?
.
Bathe all this in light.
One day we’ll darken into form.