The Man with the Blue Guitar: March 2025

LAST

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 30-31)

Here's the book's title poem, an elegy for my father. There's a 2009 blog post that might be worth consulting.

— 1930 —
Just outside Manila, it was my father's
ninth birthday, but all he could think about
was his duel with fighting kite that afternoon.

For weeks, he'd been grinding glass between
rocks: green for luck. The kite string soaked in glue
then dipped in powdered glass. In the sun,

the string would gleam — filament of emerald.
His kite emblazoned with a vermilion hawk, talons
of shiny hooks and razors hammered from tin-can lids.

At 3 P.M. sharp, his hawk dancing
a red tinikling in the sun, my father stood
by the Pasig River, his twelve-year-old opponent

on the other bank, the wind blowing downstream.
In the sky, the other kite was a silver mantis
with bat wings. The hawk and mantis swiveled

and faked like mongoose and cobra. My father
gauged the wind like a cat's paw on his cheek,
waiting for the breeze to hold its breath,

then the whiplash crack of his wrist.
Hawk whirled around mantis, razors flashing —
kite strings twining, sliced. The bat wings ripped

away in tatters. He'd won, my father had won.

Page 30

— 1989 —
Swimming in that white hospital bed — IVs like
kite strings in reverse piercing his arms —

Papa must have longed to soar, to leave behind
his sick and scarred heart, his breath trapped

in emphysemic lungs . . . O to fly
like some red-feathered bird, to dance free

in lucid air above the sparkling Pasig.
How far, then, you could see: the jungle green

rock of Corregidor leaping from
Manila Bay, the Pacific stretched flat out,

an aquamarine mirror, endless and new.
The razors of Papa's soul slashed at his lines —

invisible strings tethered deep in the ground
— then Papa launched into gold and purple sky

like the sun's first flash breaking from the east,
his fingers uncurling slowly from a clenched fist.

Page 31

Here's some of what I said about this poem in the previous blog post from 2009.

As far back as I can recall, my father told me tales about flying fighting kites, a sport he engaged in throughout his youth. Kite fighting is done in many countries across the world; the sport is a major motif in Khaled Hosseini's 2003 novel The Kite Runner, which was made into a feature film in 2007. But for me, the fighting kite was (and still is) a thing of romance, a source of adventure and fable in bedtime stories I heard from my father.

I wrote several versions of the first half of this poem over a number of years, versions that simply didn't do justice to my dreams and fantasies about kite fighting. But it was not until Papa's death in 1989 that the poem came together, as I realized that the fighting kite was, for me, a symbol of his difficult and fascinating life. The book's description on the back cover reads, in part, "Fighting Kite narrates, in verse, the life of Martin Avila Gotera — son, trickster, soldier, schizophrenic, visionary, lawyer, workingman, father &mdash a life that glimmers like a node, a shimmery knot, a glowing nexus . . ." And that's what the fighting kite is: a "nexus," a connection, a symbolic gathering of the threads, strands, strings of his life. In fact, I learned recently that the proper term is "fighter kite," but I am sticking with "fighting kite" because I think of my father as continually acting, constantly striving to make a better life for himself and his family, ultimately his people, despite illnesses and obstacles.

This poem originally appeared first in Hawaii Pacific Review in 1992. I remember that they rejected it at first because of a perceived problem in the ending, but I don't recall what the note was about: I think it might have been that they felt the ending trailed off, didn't end sufficiently strongly. I rewrote the couplet to have a slant rhyme — "east" and "fist" — and that fixed the demurral, and they accepted the poem.

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE

LAST

Friday, March 28, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 28-29)

Here's another of those father poems written during MFA school. There's a previous blog post on this poem that talks about how this poem was written for David Wojahn's workshop. More on that below, after the poem.

Papa, lately at night when the phone rings
raveling midnight into tatters, I freeze.
Just two days ago, once more your wife's
voice described the extension cord

tied to a joist in the basement, the round
loop hanging: "I'm making a rope." And there
were other times. The razor blade.
The ritalins, sixty-four white pills,

each a period for every year-long
sentence of your life. Your screams
punctuated my childhood nights;
your nightmares melded into fairy tales,

mga kuwento ng duwende. For others: the Grimm
Brothers. For me: Bataan, Corregidor, jungles
and nipa huts, a handsome soldier named Martin.
No dragons, no cinder-faced damsels,

only the night, pulsing with tracer fire.
Or maybe a samurai blade's insistent sheen.
One night, nearly stepping on an enemy soldier,
you poised on that teeter-totter, oblivion,

then all of you softly backed into still virgin
tracks and ran. Jungle gloom raveled by carbine
fire before and behind. You never knew if American
or Japanese bullets ripped your friend Pabling

apart, a sucking chest wound in his side.
And once, hemmed in by tanks, rifles, a ravine,
and a blazing cane brake, each of you slid
beneath the flames. Most escaped. But one

or two, were left behind, screaming.
Another time, a corporal hit by a shell
ran from you — headless and faltering.
His arms flailed like a windmill.

Page 28

Papa, when you watch TV,
you hammer your fist into your thigh.
Nailing yourself to the morning. To the yellow
heart of an egg, sunny side up.

I see you. Your back is jammed up against
the bole of a tree. Brown skin, your brown
uniform chameleoning the rough bark.
The Japanese plane, a hot red sun,

spits chunks of metal strung
on wires. Beads of spouting earth
converge. At the focus,
you've clawed bark under your fingernails.

Papa. Papa. Remember, they missed you that time.

Page 29

I mentioned above that I know precisely when this poem was written and workshopped. Here's what I wrote about it in that previous blog post from 2008:

The poem itself goes back to my first MFA poetry workshop with David Wojahn at Indiana University in the fall of 1986. I remember that it was the second poem I submitted to the class. And it didn't fare well in workshop. But I worked on it and worked on it . . . really as a gift to Papa. In a similar vein to Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night," my entreaty to my father not to succumb to death, to awful memory, to the demons of schizophrenia.

And I'm happy to say that now, almost twenty years after Papa died of illness, not of suicide, the poem still holds up. I put it in my 2003 chapbook Ghost Wars as well as in Fighting Kite (2007). This recent title is my elegy for Papa, for Martin Avila Gotera . . . a book-length elegy that completes the cycle begun by my earlier "Refusal to Write an Elegy." Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! Amen.

Where I said "twenty years" there, it's now thirty-six years, and still the poem holds up. I'm very proud of that.

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE

LAST

Thursday, March 27, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 26-27)

Here's another poem written during MFA school, probably in 1986. In those classes, I was writing quite a few poems about my dad and this poem was one of my attempts at "parent parity," if you will. I still need to write more poems about Mama. And probably will make a collection of mother poems. Wish me luck!

Last Christmas Eve, I woke to see Mama, dead
twelve years, bending over me in that strange bed,

but no, it was just those pale hospital green
walls, the yellow daze of fever. I'm seeing

things, I thought. But it must have been like that
for my father, a woman with blue-black hair in whites

bending over him during morning rounds,
like the Tenente and Cathy in A Farewell to Arms.

Around them—like a 1940s black-
and-white flick—the war. Sirens and ack-ack

guns, Manila covered with a shroud of smoke
again. General MacArthur returning like

an iron bloodhound, the Japanese kneeling by the sea.
When I was nine, that's how I'd wanted it to be.

I didn't want my parents to meet in a bank
in San Francisco, Tagalog words like magnets

drawing them together. But that Florence
Nightingale bedside scene never took place.

Those knotted hospital sheets tight around my chest,
I recalled Mama's cancer. How doctors christened

her a "model" patient. Once a pediatrician,
she had already fingered all their talismans:

chemotherapy, radiation treatment,
her hair falling out, her body shucking off weight.

At Carew and English, Papa and I found
she'd already ordered a shiny cedar coffin.

Page 26

Now my father lies in a VA ward in
California—when I visit, he is skinny

as a nine-year-old boy, legs like useless sticks.
He speaks of the war, the Bataan death march,

how thin he'd gotten in the concentration camp.
He tells me how he misses Mama sometimes.

More desperately than his hand on my hair, I want
to see my mother in white, next to the window,

the stethoscope gleaming round her neck.
The sun glints in her hair, full and black.

Page 27

In 2008, I was getting requests from people — mainly students — about my life so I wrote an autobiography (or part of one) in a blog post. I meant to come back to that project and continue the autobiograpny beyond 1976 . . . a lot of years to go!

Here's what I said on this poem in that blog post:

With regard to my poetics, I would probably highlight my employment of slant rhyme here. First, clearly there are full rhymes: "dead" and "bed," "black" and "ack." There is one instance of pararhyme (or consonantal rhyme, a là Wilfred Owen): "want" and "window." There are also quite acceptable slant rhymes, such as "that" and "whites," or "neck" and "black." But then I also use some very distant rhymes: "rounds" and "arms," "bank" and "magnets," for example. I really wanted quite a bit of diversity in the rhyming. And also my trademark "roughed-up" pentameter.

Basically, I wanted couplets that any formalist could recognize as rhymed couplets but which proponents of free verse would think was free verse. I wanted the best of both worlds in what was at that time, in the 1980s, an armed-camp atmosphere between the free-verse poets and the so-called neoformalists. As in so many contexts, I played at being the joker, the wild card.

That last paragraph is a clue to when the poem was written. It was in MFA school that I was doing that balancing act.

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE

LAST

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 24-25)

I read this poem just a week ago to an audience of veterans. I gave a reading on 18 March 2025 at the Iowa Veterans Home, and this poem was well-received.

This poem has had an interesting publication history. It first appeared in The Journal of American Culture (1993). Then it was published in my poetry collection Dragonfly (1994). Reprinted in Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1996). Then it appeared again in Fighting Kite (2007).

The poem has also appeared a couple of times in the blog. First in 2009, in "Keeping Six Words Tumbling in Air" (when I discussed it with some University of Georgia students whose professor had assigned it in an Asian American literature course) and second in 2025, as part the serialization of my book Dragonfly.

In the more recent post from this year, I said, "this poem needs a trigger warning: a derogatory word for Asian appears in it, a word that is here because this is soldier talk from the '70s. I have not changed this word because it is true to the voice of this character (and it is a character, not myself)."

A fragrance remembered is Vietnam—
the acrid odor of gunpowder and tracer fire,
smudgy cooking fires in every hooch, the pungent scent
of nước mắm and water buffalo shit, a father's
acid sweat as he searches for his lost son
in some ville, smoking from an H&I strike—all this was my wish.

I'd look at my class A's in their plastic bag in the closet and wish
sometimes I too had been to the 'Nam.
I remembered basic training at Fort Ord, double timing in the sun
to the range. "Ready on the left! Ready on the right! Fire
at will!" Late nights in the latrine, I wrote my father
long letters about being afraid I'd be sent

over there. Everyone in the platoon was afraid of being sent,
but not one of us admitted it. "Sure wish
they'd ship me over to that motherfucker,"
we said to each other in the noonday light, "Vietnam—
can't wait. Shoot me a fucking gook or two, fire
mortars all goddamn night." Papa'd write back, "Son,

let God's will be done. Just be a good son.
Just do your job. If they send you, then they send
you. That's all." And I'd lie on my dark bunk and smoke—the fiery
tip of the cigarette curling like a tracer ricochet—wishing
I loved it all. C-rations, the firing range, the memorized Vietnamese
phrases, my leaky shelter half on bivouac. All for Papa.

That was as close as I would get to my father's
war. I'm sure my grandfather called him a good son,
both in the U.S. Army, the Philippine Scouts. Their Vietnam
had been Bataan. When the sergeant would send
my father out on point, did he wish
even for a moment that he hadn't joined up? Did artillery fire

Page 24

make him cringe in his foxhole? That time he was caught in crossfire,
did he try to will himself into a tree, a rock, a bird? Papa,
I knew only the mortar's crump and whoosh,
the parabolic path reaching up to California sun.
I never knew the shrapnel's white-hot whistle at arc's end.
Two nights ago, I dreamt I was in Vietnam:

a farmer runs for the tree line—I fire a crisp M-60 burst—Vietcong,
for sure, for sure. The LT sends me up to verify. In shimmering sun,
Charlie's face is the one I wash in my helmet. No. It's your face, Papa.

Page 25

Here's an excerpt from the 2009 blog post on this poem, with regard to some of the specific wording:

In line 6, "H&I" stands for Harrassment and Interdiction: indiscriminate artillery fire at the enemy to break their morale; of course, this procedure caused a great deal of so-called "collateral damage," i.e., injury and death among civilians and noncombatants. Ain't military terminology as fun as a barrel of junkies? In line 7, "class A's" are semi-formal Army uniforms, similar to a suit and tie. A "shelter half" refers to half of a pup tent (line 24); two soldiers would team up to make up a single tent for bivouac or encampment. The Philippine Scouts (line 27) were an elite US Army unit before and during WWII; the Philippine Army was a separate force from the Philippine Scouts. In line 37, an M-60 is a heavy, belt-fed machine gun. Finally, "LT" stands for lieutenant and is pronounced ell-TEE (line 38).

This excerpt continued with a reference to the 1996 textbook appearance: "With regard to the Wong textbook in particular, there are two errors. The word 'is' in the first line was typeset as 'in' in the textbook. Also, 'nước mắm' is misspelled in the textbook as 'nuoe mam,' without the diacritics essential in printed Vietnamese." The reason I brought it up is that blog post was intended to address some students at the University of Georgia who were reading my poems in the textbook in a class, and their professor contacted me to discuss the poems with them. The added benefit is that my own students in classes where we discussed my poems in the textbook since then have had that resource as well.

With regard to poetic craft, this poem is a sestina. Here's what I said in that 2009 blog post: "[T]he sestina repeats the ending words of each line in the sestets (six-line stanzas) so that they eventually appear at the end of every possible location (the first line of the sestet, the second line, etc.). Then the repeating words (called repetons [REHP-uh-tawns]) appear in a three-line stanza (known as an envoi [own-VWAH]), two words per line, one at the end of the line and the other in the middle." This is actually not accurate . . . I misnamed the repeating end-words; they are in fact called teleutons (TELL-you-tawns).

Take a look at the 2009 blog post for a diagram (in color!) of how the teleutons cycle throughout the poem. I quite like my discussion of how the teleutons are altered as the poem unfolds:

As you can see, I "cheat" by altering the repetons occasionally (this is pretty common practice among contemporary writers of the sestina). For example, "Vietnam" becomes "'Nam" in stanza 2, "Vietnamese" in stanza 4, and finally "Vietcong" in the envoi. Almost always sestina alterations are done through consonance ("wish" ——> "whoosh" ——> "wash"). I'm pretty proud of how, in stanza 6, the "sent"/"send" sound is rendered by "arc's end" — cool, eh? I'm even more proud (perversely so) of "father" becoming "motherfucker" . . . a kind of literalist double entendre. And there is even a basis here (admittedly distant) in rich consonance: /f/ and /r/ in father and motherfucker, not to mention that the /th/ sound appears in both words. Poetry . . . no, poetics . . . is fun, kids!

Finally, I want to focus on the genesis of the poem. I had read an excellent story, "The Persistence of Memory" by Walter Howerton, Jr. (from an anthology called The Perimeter of Light), about a Vietnam-vet wannabe who is driven to fakery to try to connect with his dead WWII-vet father. This poem is an imitation of that fine story, using some of my own autobiographical details: I am a Vietnam era vet — I was in the US Army during the Vietnam war but was not sent there — and I imagined a soldier like me connecting with his WWII-vet father, modeled after my own father. Anyway, the poem is not autobiographical, essentially, although it does use elements from my father's and my personal history. There's more on this in the earlier two blog posts.

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE

LAST

Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 22-23)

This poem was published in The Kenyon Review in 1991, and since I only moved to California in 1989 after finishing my MFA, I must have written this poem during MFA school. I think this poem was probably workshopped in Yusef Komunyakaa's class, though there is a connection with my professor David Wojahn as well (described below). The poem is about my father's mental illness, specifically his stays in psych wards. (There's a blog post from 2009 on this poem, also.)

Vin, that psych ward is Dante's Inferno — circles
within circles, you climb and climb. The sons
of bitches in white, they're monsters and devils.

You see, son, you're paying for your sins
while you're there. Each circle a privilege
you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion,

the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed's
made up with wet sheets and you become Satan
on ice — the teeth chattering inside your head,

stones rattling round and round in a can.
Then once a week, they take you down for shock,
the mouse killed again with an elephant gun.

First time was '46: the bed just like
an electric chair — electrodes, colored wires —
That's all I can remember. Except for that shock,

vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes.
And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds
or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies.

Closest to outside is the circle called grounds
privileges, they let you walk all the way out
to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding

the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers,
the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas,
saying you're different from real people. But how

do you get there? Between is a tortured drama:
wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass
— mixing with real lunatics, the gamut

Page 22

running from rapists to certified pigstickers,
manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils
in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it's

always the walk I'll remember. The Thorazine shuffle.
We're all diviners doomed to Dante's Eighth
Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal.

We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish
it would end . . . we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle
in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle
in line . . . our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh.

Page 23

Here's an excerpt of what I said about this poem in the earlier blog post mentioned above:

My father was a schizophrenic. This doesn't mean he had multiple personalities — the layperson's usual (mis)understanding of schizophrenia. It meant, among other things, that my father sometimes heard voices, saw visions. In the Philippines, this meant Martin Avila Gotera was considered a visionary man. In the US, it just meant he was crazy.

During my childhood, my father was often in and out of psych wards. In "Newly Released . . ." I imagine Papa telling me what life is like inside the psych ward at the VA hospital. Some of the material in the poem comes from things my father did tell me, for example, about his being given shock therapy at Letterman Army Hospital, though the details about that in the poem are wholly imagined. The wet-sheet treatment is also something Papa endured.

I suppose some readers of the poem may think of the Dante connection as arising out of my literary background. Well, first, my father was himself a fiction writer who studied literature avidly and so quite likely could connect with Dante. In fact, he was quite an aficionado of The Divine Comedy. Second, my grandfather, Papa's father, Tatay, had in his sala (the formal living room), a copy of The Divine Comedy, an edition with the Doré engravings; as a small child, I used to sneak into the sala (I think now that maybe that room was off limits to the grandkids, because I remember sneaking) and pore over that huge volume. Not for the text so much — I didn't really read Dante until I was in college — but for those illustrations. I remember vividly the one that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future. There was also another showing sinners rending their chests open . . . for what infraction I have no clue. . . .

When I was in the Army, my MOS ("military occupational specialty" or job) was Military Pay Clerk. For a time, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center, where I helped mentally ill patients (all military service members) with their pay problems. This was where I learned about the system of privileges (that we see also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the poem, I have my father use as a metaphor for that system the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno. (Ironically, my father was also a mental patient at Letterman Army Hospital three decades before I worked there.) It was also at this job that I witnessed what everyone called "the Thorazine shuffle," the way the drug Thorazine made patients essentially catatonic.

With regard to the poem's poetics, here is what I said before about that:

This poem is also the result of a one-sided competition with my former teacher David Wojahn at Indiana University, where I earned my MFA in poetry. "One-sided" because I don't think David knows about "our" competition. I remember one day in an MFA workshop, 20+ years ago, David had us read and discuss Craig Raine's poem "In the Kalahari Desert" which ends with this striking line: "Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh . . ." At a poetry reading some months later, David read a poem that also featured the word "Shhh" in the last line, and he may have even mentioned his own competition-of-sorts with Raine. Not to be outdone, I eventually produced my own poem with "Shhh" as an ending, however petty and unpoetic that might sound.

In terms of craft, the poem is written in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, etc. Of course, as I suggested was my frequent mode in the previous post, I use slant rhyme, very slant rhyme. For example, "sons" / "sins" / "seclusion" or "kiss-ass" / "——stickers" / "Vin, it's." Quite distant rhyme in some places, then . . . in the case of those last three words given in that example, the two similar vowels, the trochee stress pattern, and the ending /s/. With regard to meter, perhaps predictably, a "roughed-up" pentameter (again, see the last post).

This poem is a fascinating amalgam of my father's and my own experiences in connection with the Army and mental health, especially how both are connected with Letterman Army Hospital (later Medical Center).

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE

LAST

Monday, March 24, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 20-21)

With this poem, we're back to poems written during MFA school. I think this poem may have been workshopped in David Wojahn's class. It's about my introduction into written language, into reading. What we've got in Act One of the poem is family history, about how I learned to read at age two or so. (By the way, there's a blog post from 2009 on this poem that gives more background info.)

My father, in a 1956 gray suit,
had the jungle in his tie,
a macaw on Kelly green.
But today is Saturday, no briefs
to prepare, and he's in a T-shirt.

I sit on his lap with my ABC
Golden Book, and he orders the letters
to dance. The A prancing red
as an apple, the E a lumbering elephant,
the C chased by the D while the sly F

is snickering in his russet fur coat.
My mother says my breakthrough
was the M somersaulting into a W.
Not a mouse transformed into a wallaby
at all, but sounds that we can see.

Later, my father trots me out
to the living room like a trained Z.
Not yet four, I read newspaper headlines
out loud for Tito Juanito and Tita Naty
or for anyone who drops in.

Six years later, I am that boy
in a black Giants cap, intertwining orange
letters S and F, carrying my father's
forgotten lunch to the catacombs
of the UCSF Medical Center,

and I love the hallway cool before the swirling
heat from the Print Shop door.
In his inky apron, my father smiles,
but his eyes are tired. The night before,
I pulled the pillow over my head, while he

Page 20

argued with my mother
till 2 A.M. about that old double bind:
a rule to keep American citizens from
practicing law in the Philippines.
His University of Manila

law degree made useless.
But California's just as bad.
"You can't work in your goddamn
profession stateside either!" he shouts.
"Some land of opportunity."

There in the shimmer of the Print Shop, I can't
understand his bitterness. I savor
the stacatto sounds. He leans
into the noise of huge machines, putting
vowels and consonants into neat stacks.

Page 21

Here's a bit of what I said about this poem in the earlier blog post mentioned above:

Readers of this poem often say it's about "the making of the artist." Not quite like James Joyce though, I'd say — more like "the making of the artist as a young preschooler." My father did train me for amazing feats, of sorts. He worked with me on the alphabet at age two or three so that I was reading before I was four years old. . . .

I have always thought that this poem is not about me . . . but rather about my father. His strong ambition for himself, later deflected to/through me. His dogged andeavors and planning, culminating with earning his law degree. His disappointment at the Philippines enacting a law to prevent American lawyers from practicing there (since Papa was a naturalized US citizen). His even deeper disappointment that he was also not able to be a lawyer in his beloved America; to pass the bar in California, he would have had to go back to school, but since he was already a lawyer, he felt that such schooling would be below him. His further bitter disappointments as he worked jobs in the US that he felt were similarly beneath him: selling encyclopedias door-to-door, selling dress shirts at a department store, working as an offset printer running enormous printing presses. (Some of this is also described in the autobiography started on this blog.)

Of his many jobs, the one I remember fondly was when he worked in a print shop. Ten years old, I loved the gigantic machines Papa ran, the sharp smell of the ink, the thunderous noise in the shop when the presses were turning. Probably the only way he could have been more heroic to me was if he ran a bulldozer or earth mover on a construction site.

Needless to say, he was keenly disappointed in himself for not being a lawyer, for having to work under supervisors he felt were intellectually inferior to him, etc. Today though, I gotta say, when I go to a print shop for my work as a magazine editor, all that love for Papa comes flooding back when I smell that ink-laden air, hear the thudding whirr of the presses. I don't think Papa ever knew how much I idolized his printing-press work. Though I suppose, even after the fact, that would not have been sufficient consolation for his workaday suffering. .&nbap;.&nbap;.

To round out Papa's story, he eventually did find work that suited him. As I have noted in various posts here, my father was a WWII veteran who had deep concern for veteran's issues. Papa ultimately found an occupation, not just a job, as a Contact Representative for the Veterans Administration; he assisted veterans with all sorts of problems: pensions, health care, service-connected disabilities, etc. Although this was not working with the law, the job was sometimes legalistic, and more importantly Papa felt great satisfaction in being of service to other veterans. So this is a story with a happy ending.

With regard to poetics in the poem, here's what I wrote in the previous blog post.

In terms of craft, nothing much jumps out at me that I haven't already discussed at length vis-à-vis other poems, except for the emphasis here on the letters of the alphabet. Not only in the earlier section when the child speaker is learning the magic of reading, but also the letter-based logo on the ten-year-old child's ball cap, the UCSF of Papa's work (University of California, San Francisco), and the single numeral "2" followed by the letters "A.M." And finally of course, the father's work with letters — vowels and consonants — making Papa a sort of primal man of letters, though he would not have appreciated that complexion in the least.

As I noted with a couple of the earlier poems from the first part of the book, my line breaks in those poems seem now, with the benefit of hindsight, not so confident. In this poem, the lineation seems more sure-footed, with possible exceptions in the last stanza of the first page ("can't") and the last stanza of the second page ("swirling"). Other line breaks in the poem use enjambment and endstop strategically and operationally to enhance meaning.

Finally, do look at that 2009 blog post. An interesting story in there about how Papa groomed me to be a chess Grandmaster at age 6. It's a fascinating story that explains much about the relationship Papa and I had — the ultimate topic of Fighting Kite.

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE

LAST

Sunday, March 23, 2025

Fighting Kite (pages 18-19)

The previous poem, "A Visitor on Ash Wednesday," was set in the Philippines . . . some time after my birth in San Francisco, we moved to the Philippines for some years, where Mama practiced as a doctor (a pediatrician), and Papa worked on his law degree. This poem, on the other hand, is set during that same time but in the US, where my dad, in the context of the poem, is re-establishing residency in the US as a naturalized American citizen. More on that below.

Incidentally, there's a blog post from 2008 on this poem that gives more background info.

Naturalized American citizens living overseas
must return periodically to re-establish
residency by living one year in the States.

There were the usual screaming kids, tugging
on their Mom's and Dad's arms, whining
for a Davy Crockett coonskin cap or six-gun
with holster, a Shirley-Temple-curled doll

that really wets. His son's probably playing
in the toy department, the other parents must
have thought about this lone man in line
at the San Francisco Emporium — in line to see

Santa. Between children jumping off
and on his lap, Santa looked off to his left
where a troupe of silvery Tinkerbells skated, the ice
cooling the air of this huge room, a cathedral

to free enterprise. I look now at this photo,
faded thirty years, of the man who livened up
Santa's workday: my father in a double-breasted
brown suit, his red tie spangled with fireworks.

In Santa's lap, Papa's holding a briefcase,
blonde leather fastened with buckle straps.
Papa beams at the camera with a mischievous twinkle
in his eye. Santa's smiling at this marvelous prank.

Everyone in line laughed to see a grown
man sitting on another grown man's knee.
A snapshot meant for a son, half the world
away in Manila. Your son who could hardly recall

your face. Papa, after you whisper your Christmas
wish into Santa's ear, shake his hand
man to man, then step back into the world
of business suits and residency rules, I want

Page 18

the breeze from the skaters' ice to part your hair
— shiny and black — caress your lovely face
as you glide down the Big E slide, hugging
the briefcase to your chest like a lonesome child.

Page 19

Here's what I said about this poem in the 2008 blog post mentioned above:

My father, as a naturalized American citizen (i.e., a citizen by law rather than by birth), had to re-establish residency in the US every so many years. He would spend that year living in San Francisco's International Hotel, among the manongs, male Filipino immigrants who had established this bachelor community on the edge of Chinatown.

During one of those residency trips, my father sent me a photo of him on Santa's lap at the Emporium department store, just as described in the poem. I no longer have this photo, but I remember it vividly as one of the defining images of my childhood. It's memorable not only because, as the poem says, it's a "marvelous prank," but because it shows Papa's love for me: Filipinos can be very shy, almost to the point of shame, a profound cultural emotion called hiya, and the very fact that Papa did this, despite his hiya, says volumes about what he would do for his absent son.

Papa and I never talked about the Santa event that I can remember. And so all the details are wholly imagined. The word "blonde" (female rather than the more accepted "blond") is intentional; the manongs had a slang term for their white girlfriends — "blondies" — and I don't doubt that Papa, himself a kind of honorary manong, had blondies.

The poem is also about manhood and the dignity of work. My father, as a Filipino immigrant citizen, was not always able to work in the US at a profession he felt he could respect. At the time the Santa photo was taken, however, he was working as a civil servant for the Navy and was quite happy during his residency year. By having Papa and Santa shake hands "man to man," I am symbolically lifting my father out of the daily experiences of racial prejudice he probably had during those times — the late 1950s. The poem is thus simultaneously familial and political.

I do remember that when I wrote this poem — probably in the early '90s, in Arcata, California, where I was teaching at Humboldt State University — I borrowed from the Santa scene in the movie A Christmas Story (the slide, particularly) as well as childhood memories of visiting Santa in San Francisco's downtown department store, The Emporium.

As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.

FIGHTING KITE