From 77 Chinese Dreams
Timothy Yu
15
If we imposed our archipelago
of paths unwinding midwestward on one
suburb of Chicago,
what would actually happen? Would we know
how many traces are riffed, & how many un-
spoken pains sink below
what can be remembered & written over?
Shall we tell others’ stories, safe & greedy,
since we are below par?
‘You can read me, you can speak me, know me you’ll never.
Women is braver, you say, so you can get off easy.
What I’m not, that’s what you are.’
But am I any better? Don’t I feign your voice
from the inside, which I oughter understand,
having none of
my own? What hangs, all smugness, from my choice
to invest in your failure, hiding my hand?
Timothy’s still unheard of.
21
My own people, southern & seaborne voices
and their broad faces, do they think of me?
They are sunk underground.
I read. My playmates dig, I do not dig
the backyard hole to China. Lie still.
Lie.
In thrall: to all the dead: Timothy was
anticipated! Fail.
FAIL.
Ancestral reputation wilts: come down, come down.
A bastard & losing cause, owned,
mine called; yours too.
In a Starbucks I heard an ancient sage
quoted who had not lived five thousand years
(I live) in packaged words,
millstone forever, to my art no friend,
saying ‘O come on home. O come on home.’
We were not meant.
34
My mother has her own tongue. One word, sighed
in the mind, and tended like a garden, died
by self-inflicted doubt, fell.
She would not have done that, but, unblessed,
she never had a rest, mister,—felt less
than less, the more unloved.
Now—tell me, reader, if you prefer
your love white after dusk, like a childhood deferred—
a Jill for every Jack:
she burbed for forty years, hardly enough,
& wept & pluckt—and baby (there was but
one) still small there (gone).
What is to tell the truth? when you still lack
all the booming & echoing look-like crowd’s feedback—
when they have made you sick—
silent—then it’s their broke-down lines in your mind
that sire what’s yours, in decay—their refuse
helping your poem home.
37
His makeup was to brush his mustache down
his long face, eyebrows up. So sorry are we
Mr Chan has gone?
Or is he always with us, boy made good—
we may not see or hear him—that his grift—
but his is our own story.
He has one story. He is another man
than himself; yellowface, always. Hurting us,
more other than himself.
Our apologies to Charlie, off & on
like an old motor, sputtering to grin.
We don’t know what he traded.
Aiya! draw curtain on our blindness. How?
I can’t say if he has a mind. Damn Chan,
our god of mangled sound.
Seeking his shrift, I obfuscate & remand,
guilty parity. For my style is dispossessed,
on someone else’s land.
Timothy Yu is the author of the poetry collection 100 Chinese Silences (Les Figues Press, 2016), recently reissued by punctum books, 2024. He is also the author of two scholarly books, Diasporic Poetics: Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and Australia and Race and the Avant-Garde: Experimental and Asian American Poetry since 1965, and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First Century American Poetry and Nests and Strangers: On Asian American Women Poets. His work has appeared in Poetry, The New York Times Magazine, Fence, and The New Republic. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.