MiPOesias Magazine 2007 - Asian-American Issue

Jennifer Chang

from A MOVE TO UNCTION

EACH THING IS TWO THINGS

A line thin as thread
plucks a mute note.
Why should a line
not have a song? Why
should a line
be a wire? At once,
a string and
an attachment. I am
thinking only of what
matters now. I cannot
love anyone if I do not
know why I should or who
could love me.
Or Sister had asked, How
can you be happy being
a weed’s seed?
But all seeds grow something.
A line made loose
by bad weather
does not lose itself to storm,
keeps the lineness
of a ligament which is a word
like any other. So I grow
a tin roof, a wall of stone,
stalks made strong by grief
blooming the cement bud
I’ll call rose. It is what
I want it to be, even if
I must lie. Perhaps Sister knows
our tears are glue. This too, a line.
So the silence is a sylph
and so we will.

© Jennifer Chang 2007

Jennifer Chang's poems are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, and The New Republic and have appeared in New England Review, Poetry Daily, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received scholarships and fellowships to Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, The Corporation of Yaddo, MacDowell Colony, and Sewanee Writers' Conference. She is a Commonwealth Fellow and Ph.D candidate in English at the University of Virginia and serves as communications director of Kundiman.