Translations
from the Mother Tongue
for
my mother
1. Khimjahng
It
held you once. Chora of hands splashing
water,
to scour and peel mugwort piled in bamboo
creels.
Chora of knives hacking sowthistle or
lotus-root,
steel beating against wood boards, blades
glinting.
It was. Now November sun slants into your
eye
from a foreign sky. You scrub, rinse,
chop, wring.
In America you labor through khimjahng
alone
without your sisters, an ocean away, or
your mother,
long dead. There must be hunger in these
rhythms,
if not happiness. To cut and crisp cabbage
with salt,
to smear shreds of wild radish, bracken
or scallion
with chili, skinned anchovies, garlic
crushed to pith.
Next your arms work the spices in. Slap.
Slur.
Nose stinging from onion-juice and pepper-fumes,
eyes tearing. Your fingers slowly blister,
stain.
Meanwhile your mouth waters, starved for
the taste
of home, not wanting to wait until winter
seasons
what you bury now. Pack the clay crocks
well;
cram the khimchee jars with what
will sour and scald.
This is the covenant of autumn, its hard
blessing:
what survives cannot survive unscathed,
not fallen
burr or shoot, not fists of spore or snarled
taproot.
Dig the furrows deep, sow the hahngari
in rot.
Steep them in the element that destroys
and saves.
2. P'ansori
You are singing of
bamboo flutes and barrel drums,
clapping as your village celebrates the
birth of a child,
red peppers spread out on straw mats to
dry.
You sing of hemp-weavers spinning fabric
for hanboks,
knife-grinders, papermakers pounding mulberry
bark,
workers hauling burlap sacks of pinenut
or quince.
Fishermen watch mask-dances set to kayagum
and gong.
Street peddlars hawk makkolli,
soju, soup boiled with sea-bracken,
shark fins, dried squid, ginseng roots
pickling in jars, tiger balm.
There are sweet rice cakes and pears piled
like sandbags,
and paper lanterns lit with candles for
the wounded,
sculling down the river to the open sea.
There are soldiers in your song, gunfire,
a city bombed to rubble,
and starved dogs gnawing the bodies of
the dead.
A surf of objects that beat against the
doors of the skull
and are never abandoned,
the sand-grain variousness of things that
can't be known
or forgotten, of people that have vanished.
I listen for your mother in your voice
and cannot know
if I find her. Not much lives on, from
one generation
to the next. Not much, but not
nothing: maybe the Paektu mountain tune
you both loved, crags grizzled with pine,
rock maple,
black walnut, their burred and scabrous
spines.
Shagbark or needledust. Gingkos scoured
by snow.
Or cabbage chopped and scummed with pepper,
stocked in clay vessels, rocked into the
soil like seeds.
Buried in fall, dug up in spring, soured,
spiced,
to nourish and to burn. Tell me if this
is true.
I want to know what survives, whats
handed down
from mother to daughter, if anything is,
bond I cannot cut away, that keeps apart
what it lashes together.
And I want to know what cannot be handed
down, the part of you
thats only you, lonely fist of sinew
and blood,
deep in your gut where cords lash bone,
nerve, breath,
the part of you that first began to sing.
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