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   INTRO FRONT CONTENTS PREVIOUS NEXT LAST