Here's the last poem in Fighting Kite.
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Midnight upon midnight, I and my Macintosh computer
wrestle for an audience—the voiceless ghost of my father.
Our simple playing field: this ephemeral chess
board constructed of fluorescent dots on a glass screen,
tickled to life by an electronic finger. An everyday magic
like Oprah, the Simpsons, and The Price Is Right on TV.
I once tried to explain on the phone to my father how TV
worked, and all the century's panoply: semiconductors, computers,
microwave ovens, word processors. To him, it was all just magic.
Like men in tuxedoes pulling rabbits out of hats, said Papa.
No tougher than horse-drawn calesas, window blinds, screen
doors, or crescent wrenches. You want something tough, take chess.
Now there's something subtle and intricate for you. Chess:
the supreme game of military strategy. Teach you to be
a general, a leader of men. No bullshit. No screwing
around with scientific gimmicks. And I said, Computers!
The army used computers in Vietnam! My father and grandfather
had both been soldiers—the word army was like magic
to them: a secret password. But he wouldn't let himself be magicked—
We lost that war, Vin. You know that. I couldn't believe it. Jeez!
Did Papa speak those words? This man who'd dreamed of fathering
a military dynasty, like some epic three-night-long miniseries on TV?
All I'd really wanted was to tell him that I had a computer
that could play chess—the board and men all on a CRT screen.
That I missed him. That the board looked 3-D on the screen.
That maybe he'd like to take the machine on, feel the magic
of challenging the Grand Master living deep inside the computer.
He'd wanted me to be the next Grand Master, an 8-year-old reading chess
strategy manuals. We never played again. In memory's television,
a cockroach large as a carved rook waves its antennas near my father's
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head in bed—it was the last time I saw him. I left on a plane. Papa
died two months later. And now I try to penetrate, enter the screen
of my Macintosh. In my mind, like some nature show on public TV,
the cockroach on the pillow and Papa's eyes closing, all in the magic
of slow motion, their movements rehearsed and mechanical like chess.
I play game after game in cybernetic space—and the computer
always wins. This morning at dawn, I rose from computer chess
and stood at the living-room window: a TV screen lit up by a magical
saffron sunrise. I whispered into the glow: It's your move, Papa.
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Page 33
Chess was a huge part of my relationship with Papa. Here's part of the story in a blog post from 2009:
When I was about six, he decided he would make me into a chess Grandmaster. So every day, we would drill on the chessboard, sometimes for hours. The King's Gambit. The Sicilian Defense. The Ruy Lopez Opening. (I only now learned, via Google, that there's an interesting irony here because the Philippines was named after King Philip not by Magellan, it turns out, but by the Spanish explorer Ruy López de Villalobos. Fancy that. Ruy Lopez. I wonder if my father knew that.)
We would replay famous chess games, such as the 1956 so-called "Game of the Century" in which chess master Donald Byrne lost to 13-year-old Bobby Fischer; as we duplicated the moves in these replayed games, Papa would have me analyze what made each move weak or strong. I suppose Papa was probably glad he taught me to read early, because he had me begin reading chess strategy manuals at this time. We spent a lot of time with endgame puzzles and checkmate tactics. (The only result of this training is that I ultimately lost my love for chess and now play only seldom.)
I've often wondered if I disappointed my dad by not continuing to play chess as I grew older. Because of that intense chess training as a kid, I really lost my interest in chess. I was probably only playing to please my dad, not for myself. When I became a dad, I never pushed any of my kids to be this or that — it was more important to let them find their own passions. Anyway, when I wrote this poem, it was, in a way, a little bit out of guilt. And also the understanding that, after my dad died, that I would never be able to play chess with him again.
By the way, with regard to poetics, this is a sestina. This medieval form, based on a six-line stanza (a sestet), takes the six final words in the first six lines and juggles them until each word has ended up in each of the line endings of the following sestets. This process takes up six stanzas. Then the last (seventh) stanza (a 3-line envoi) contains all six words (called teleutons, by the way) with three of them at the three line endings; the other three teleutons appear usually in the middle of the lines, so generally two teleutons per line. I have a good breakdown of the sestina form in this 2009 blog post. Here is another useful source about sestinas. And one more how-to source. Try writing one of these . . . sestinas are fun!
As always, I'd love to get some feedback or discuss anything with all y'all. Comment, okay? Thanks. Ingat.
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