THREE POEMS

THE ROAD TO KANZAKI: A STORY ABOUT THE WAR AS TOLD BY MY AUNT KEIKO

On the road to Kanzaki, she found an oddly
soothing quality in the ox’s clocking trot,
the wood cart’s creak and sway as the sun slid

and clouds bloomed with evening’s lilac brown.
Then she found herself on the road, alone,
pointed in the way she should go—

the bombed station, the sea of pleading
eyes, the cool of the river grass, the bus’s
swaddled carcass of burning steel giving way

to a moonlit road, a sky shorn of stars
and menaces, as the kind farmer with the
ox cart who had brought her there

had gone as far as he had promised to.
A nursery song remembered from childhood
kept her courage up and the hungry ghosts

at bay, who trailed behind, drawn by the smell
of meat, a slab of rationed beef wrapped
in butcher paper, which she toted in a canvas

satchel slung on her shoulder across her
school girl’s uniform. If only she hadn’t stopped
at that ration line at the station, but she’d

almost forgotten the taste of beef. Then
the American planes came, rattling the ground
under her feet, the raised glass and concrete

pulled down from around her, revealing
the hellish dream. It all seemed so distant now
and strange as the city she now headed to,

under blackout, offered not a single ember,
only the road that shone under that full moon,
lighting her feet the way that they should go.

NOSTALGIA AND MEMORY

What is an American? How is a new man made
or remade after the image of his own
invention? A shipyard is bombed and a language,

erased. An old fisherman gets his boat
confiscated. (He’d been ratted on by a dirty local,
a rival, because as another local liked to say,

Dah Japanee guy was dah bettah fisherman.)
A beloved teacher vanishes from under
his pupils’ noses, with silence as the only

explanation. When he returns, he mumbles
in broken syllables of the meek. To get to the far
outhouse in a stubbled field, harried issei trip

over themselves to prove who is most
patriotic. As evidence they bring family heirlooms
to be heaped and burned, exchanging beauty

for ashes, nostalgia for drunkenness,
feeding high, glamorous flames of self hate.
In this country of forgetting,

their names remember them, their places
of origin these objects enshrine: lacquer cabinets,
like little black ovens, eating the portable

gods inside and the family registries (such fancy
ideas they’d entertained!) translated
by a leaping tongue, pale curlicue of script.

INDUSTRY

By the sweat of your face you laced
with table sugar the languorous tea cup hours
of another man’s afternoons of leisure

then on leased land imprinted the baked earth
with the narrow furrows of your dreams.  Knowing
the way up and the way down to be the same,

you climbed the dizzy ladder of riches
playing the undertaker, cheerful
in the knowledge you’d never lack for clients

dying to cash in.  Calloused hand over
patient fist, you bought back lost privileges
that the first born, going to pieces,

had divided among three noble vices,
beneficiaries of the family estate,
till, seated at your own table in the manor

you rebuilt plank by stone, you sounded
the clapper of a servant bell, at whose summons
shoji doors slid back and a woman servant

appeared—kimonoed, diminutive, rescued
from a desperate fate—holding a lacquer tray
arranged with assorted steaming dishes,

which she laid out before you with ceremonial
exactness, kneeling attentive at your side,
filling your raised tumbler with hot sake.

__

Derek N. Otsuji is a writer from Hawaii. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Atlanta Review, Crab Orchard Review, Monarch Review, Poet Lore, Puerto del Sol, Salamander, Silk Road Review, and Sycamore Review.