My time at the university was tumultuous. I was a diligent student weighed down by anguish. I would sputter to an almost stop, and some kind soul would help me on, or give me something to sink in to. One of those gifts was a poetry collection by Lynda Hull, slid to me in a bar well past midnight. She is almost forgotten now, a rising sun who passed too quick.
Every few years, I am drawn to dig out a particular poem from "Ghost Money". For me, this is some of the best verse of our generation. Lynda Hull consistently wrote in broad strokes of skill, which poured out the heart longings, the toil of life, the ample loneliness of an ever-seeking soul. Here we go:
--
Lynda Hull from Ghost Money
Univeristy of Massachusetts Press
"And all things are forgiven...it would be strange not to forgive." - Checkov
Chinese New Year
The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows
pasted with colored squares, past the man
who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past
crates of doves and roosters veiled
until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets
with sulphur as people exchange gold
and silver foil, money to appease ghosts
who linger, needy even in death. I am
almost invisible. Hands could pass through me
effortlessly. This is how it is
to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows
untranslatable as the shop signs,
the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle
in the stairwell, the corridor where
the doors are blue mouths ajar. Hands
gesture in the smoke, the partial moon
of a face. For hours the soft numeric
click of mah-jongg tiles drifts
down the hallway where languid Mai trails
her musk of sex and narcotics.
There is no grief in this, only the new year
consuming itself, the door knob blazing
in my hand beneath the light bulb’s electric jewel.
Between voices and fireworks
wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush—
no language I want to learn. I can touch
the sill worn by hands I’ll never know
in this room with its low table
where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign
for Jade Palace sheds green corollas
on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here
in the chastening glow, darkening
my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest
of my life widening away from me, waiting
for the man I married to pass beneath
the sign of the building, to climb
the five flights and say his Chinese name for me.
He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets
where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where
the new year is liquor, the black bottle
the whole district is waiting for, like
some benevolent arrest—the moment
where men and women turn to each other and dissolve
each bad debt, every sly mischance,
the dalliance of hands. They turn in the lamplight
the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway.
He brings fish. He brings lotus root.
He brings me ghost money.
