clarahsu – Page 26

The Living Tree

When I was small my father always insisted on buying a real tree for Christmas. Father, who worked with wood every day, wanted only authentic things. As his piano business prospered, each year the tree grew bigger, until one year it nearly touched the living room ceiling. These trees were tossed out after the holidays, but at that time we didn’t think too much about this sort of thing.

In his old age Father still puts on Christmas lights around his kitchen window. His trees have been small potted gifts from friends. When a tree gets too big he instructs the gardener to plant it in his backyard. One has grown into a beautiful blue spruce.

Last night my daughter Julia sent a photo of her Christmas tree—a baby rosemary bush. She’ll continue to have fresh herb after the holidays. The tradition goes on, but with a much more considerate attitude.

Photo by Julia Hsu.

A Serenade at Dawn

Home is atop three hills. The second is the steepest. The bus stops. Lights. Noise. And out I come. Seven O’clock is already dark. There is a power outage. The street looks strange and quiet. Silhouettes of trees are more noticeable. As I make my way up, the sky opens with cloud patches. The moon, a cowlick among the first stars. A shiver runs through my body. What am I afraid of?

The house is colder than outside. Dore curls under a mound of blankets. No, no dinner, couldn’t cook. No radio. No internet. I light a candle. It fills the room with a soft glow.

Night is for sleeping. Somehow I’m reminded. To bed. To bed!

An Aubade at Dusk

It is always cheerful, seeing shadows whitening in the room. One cat’s warm belly against my head and another purring at the bend of my leg. To get up means upsetting the critters, and that is enough reason to stay warm under the covers, at least until one of us moves.

Images of night linger. Fragments of a dream, fuzzy on the edges. Something brilliantly composed is melting away. A smile, shy and sweet, tender.

Tender is the moment, this returning; though lovers see dawn as a cruel sign to part. A slow rise so as not to twist the back or hurt the knees. A soft landing.

Elegy for a Black Cat

Paris, 1998. You reclined on an overstuffed chair with your eyes half-opened. I tip-toed past you, surveying the beds with worn quilts and the living area full of old world furnishings. When I went downstairs the man at the sales counter asked if I had run into you.

“No,” I said, “there was only a black cat.”

“Oh,” he said as a matter of fact, “George is in disguise.”

Every time I think of Shakespeare and Company I think of you, George Whitman, disguised as a black cat, watching me waking up to the world of words in your living room. You might be pleased to know since that evening you have kept me in your magic realm, and whenever I come across a photo or the mention of your shop I tremble with nostalgia.

This morning the news said you were gone. The overstuffed chair might be empty, but I think you had simply moved to a different corner when no one was looking.

* * *

He sleeps, among angels
and wakes
to find himself a traveler
weary from uninterested companions

to follow the light
leading down a misty trail
at the tolling of a bell.

His unshaven face harsh
against rain
coming from somewhere
even darker above

and the fever has never left him
or is it fervor that carries his body
down the wet pavement

arriving at a bench put there
once upon a time by an old cat,
black, its fur shinny, sleeps
with folded paws in an armchair
two flights above.

“Be not inhospitable to strangers,
lest they be angels in disguise.”

photo by Yauami2000

Abstract Reality

A friend complained,”My girlfriend said I don’t listen when she talks, but in fact I do.”

“Reality is subjective.” I replied.

So does everything else. Someone had said life is fiction. I didn’t understand what he meant at the time. But in reality everything depends on the point of view. If reality is abstract then everything is fiction.

It’s too scary to think culture, tradition and moral values are fictions that we love to drown ourselves in. And to think that there are other “books” out there with different plots, that some of us will read them and come up with different sets of reality—no wonder the world is in constant conflicts.

It was a freeing moment for my friend. He started to name: time, space, measurements…things that we invent that seem so one dimensional and yet they are not. How many facets are there in the looking glass?

End of the Year

What does the end of the year feel like? Well, energy is diminishing and there is pining for something new. I feel this acutely. What has begun with great enthusiasm at the beginning of the year is becoming a commitment. Maybe it has to do with shortened daylight and winter cold. “It IS the dying season.” A friend had said. But the birthing season, which is right around the corner, also begins with darkness.

Maybe that’s why we party, to celebrate the last of the shedding. What else are we going to do when the end is near? It’s terrible for school students to have finals this week. It’s not a suitable time to squeeze information into the brain—like giving a dying man a booster shot, making living artificial.

Sleep. The bears, the chipmunks, the frogs, the snakes, the turtles have it right, so that there is renewed energy to welcome the dawn.

Beyond Fatigue there is a Place

I’m curious about this place, where the mind can no longer exert its control.

Veg-out in front of the TV. The brain cannot function anymore. Too tired. Exhausted.

No! To go to this place I have to push a little. TV or the radio are detrimental to the journey, but a pen and paper will do very nicely. I’m too tired to think that I’m not thinking and too tired to think that I’m writing. In this bleary state words and images seem to float freely in space and they don’t ask anything of me. But many times I have retrieved from thought- fragments to whole poems.

If the mind is fresh after rest then what is at the other end of the spectrum? It is not staleness. Staleness is in the middle, when the mind is bored and disinterested in whatever it is performing. The other end of the spectrum is freedom, and fatigue is one of the keys that can unlock the mind-gate and take me there.

Reading a Poem in a Chinese Restaurant

Capitol Restaurant was surprisingly crowded on a Sunday afternoon. All the tables were taken except the counter. So I sat, ordered a seafood and bok choy on rice. The soup came immediately but the dish was taking a while. The lady sitting next to me was reading the newspaper. I took out Robert Duncan’s book of poems.

Er, what do Chinese food and poetry have in common? Well, the noise of dishes and people talking did not help my concentration. It was certainly the wrong place for deep stuff. But look at this: page 36, “…This city and its people hide in the hideous city about us, among the hideous crowds in this street…” It was me, having a respite between duties, hiding in a Chinese restaurant “…yearning for bliss, so that they know not what to do but must go as the thought of bliss sends them...” Food. Food. Food. Bliss!

My dish came. I ate, savoring the shrimp and calamari and tender greens. I had been coming to Capitol for nearly thirty years, eating lunch with my dad daily when we were running the music shop. For a long time, it was our second dining room.

“And we have made a station of the way to the hidden city in the rooms where we are.”

Quotations taken from Structure of Rime XXIV, Robert Duncan/Bending the Bow.

The Power Of Influence

While “no” was not my son’s first word, it was certainly his main vocabulary whenever he encountered parental power. He saw it as a struggle. I saw it as imparting wisdom. He did not want my wisdom.

I don’t think you can influence someone if they don’t want to be influenced. “I’ll break him.” My ex-husband once said, meaning, making my son submit to whatever it was that we desired at that moment. But in fact we were the ones who had to break open and humbled before any kind of communication was achieved.

Compromise is not influence. It is temporary appeasement; useless except to catch a breath. In the end, I think it is more important to just love.

Working Dream

My father, when he was working, used to take problems home. He stewed on them as he did household chores or listened to music or played his cello. At night, he slept on them. Many times I saw him at work, eager and excited, told me that he had solved the problem the night before while he was sleeping.

Now in his old age, the one big problem he has to solve is being able to sleep. The solution does not lie in sleeping but in waking. He tries drinking warm milk, camomile tea, or snacking a small cookie. He checks the time when he wakes and estimates the approximate time when he falls asleep. The problem, unlike his youthful ones, requires compromise. It is almost comical at times to watch the great man bowing down to a slippery teaser. But as his body wears down, his mind is still a beautiful thing.

Photo by Karen Lam.