a news report from the new york times
documents the end of a love affair:



"with a vast oil slick now within only 20 miles of the ecologically fragile lousianna coastline, coast guard officials said they were considering a 'controlled burn' of the petroleum on the surface of the gulf of mexico. admiral landry said that the burn would take place offshore where no one on land could see it. a burn does not get rid of the oil entirely. it leaves a waxy residue that can either be skimmed from the surface or sink to the bottom of the ocean."


[excerpts taken from "controlled burn considered for gulf oil spill;" by leslie kaufman; 4.27.10; http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/us/28spill.html?scp=10&sq=bp%20oil%20spill&st=cse]

if it isn't you, then it's someone else:

i want you to know, i desire the kind of
intimacy that exists between the two wings
of a butter------fly in brilliant motion.

tenderness that can survive even the
loneliness of death----------of life.

and i want to learn with you,
if at all possible, how to be at once
closed---------opened, like said wings
of hummingbird vibration: be----------still
with the one you love,
against the pull of gravity.

my mother and father on their third or
fourth date; circa 1982



In graduate school, my father dated a woman who was plain but sweet. She could have made him happy. A poor boy from the countryside, he had a family to support: There was his alcoholic father who gambled away all his life savings investing in a pachinko parlor, his square-faced mother who struggled to make ends meet sewing dresses and selling rice by the kilo, his two younger brothers still in school, and his older sister who dreamt of owning finer things one day.

He couldn't decide if it'd be worth the effort to court this lady friend of his, so my father walked around with a red bean (a symbol of love in Taiwanese culture) and a 10NT coin in his trousers pocket for weeks on end.

The 10NT coin eventually grew into a hundred, and then a thousand, until my father was able to travel to the other side of the world to America. He lived in a foreign country for thirteen years, and made just enough to send some money home to his family still on that faraway island in the Pacific. On days when he felt the nostalgia bug course through his veins, he'd drive to the international airport and watch the planes take off one by one.

He'd then come home to a beautiful wife, who struggled to sustain her excitement over their shiny, new microwave in a kitchen that was smaller than her bedroom at home. After all, she had grown up with maids and drivers, and weekend outings to the movie theater to watch the Sound of Music when it finally arrived from overseas. In America, she found out that Ritz crackers were sold in bulk on aisles in supermarkets all over the city, and they soon lost their golden imported taste she remembered so well from her childhood.

Nothing ever sprouted from the red bean my father had housed in his pocket so many decades ago.

a date with "the great stuffed owl" whose title
garrison keillor coined so brilliantly effortlessly



coffee despite a weak stomach.
i feel compelled to reclaim addictions,
if only to draw a line between
who-i-was and who-i-am-without-

you, learn that your heart still breaks the same
ways it did at seventeen. perhaps a little wiser,
i've matured to the extent that i won't go
so far in methods of glamorous self-
destruction as to take up smoking

again. arm yourself with a book of poems,
go to a café and annotate furiously in the dark corner,
while all the beautiful people brush elbows
in spaces of sunlight sipping their handcrafted beers.

you start to scribble insane notes (narcissism dies hard) like this
one in the margins of the text:

lacan's mirror stage = illusion of
wholeness (a.k.a. "baby blob"). the recognition of a
FALSE ego constructed by language-lies causes traumatic
loss of unity; desire to fill [maternal] lack inevitably
leads to a never-ending chain of EMPTY signifiers
= love/hate binary!!!

are the words floating off the page now? another refill
and you think, i should have folded myself up neatly
this morning and hid in the drawer, alongside the moth-
eaten sweaters and the heavy, winter coats.

but then you remember it's spring— april in fact,
and a hipster version of t.s. eliot makes eyes at you from
the neighboring table, peering through round tortoise shell
frames that remind you about the consequences
of mixing memory and desire with your
sixth cup of coffee:

a sour aftertaste.
heartburn that lasts for days on
end.

my life at the age of 22, straight out of college
and working in new york city:

"stand in between the closing doors, please."

marguerite duras